Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty is an autobiography of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus.

In 1986[2] Grameen acquired 783 ponds to eventually start a Fisheries Foundation, utilizing previously unused resources while providing jobs for the local poor.

[4] One Grameen borrower in each rural Bangladesh village was entrusted with a cell phone and the job of selling telephone service to her neighbors.

The movie tells the story of Muhammad Yunus, a Bengali economist and banker, inventor of microcredit and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 along with his Grameen Bank.

For the script of his Banker to the Poor, written together with the famous Sergio Donati, Amenta was awarded and praised by Robert De Niro at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Italian producer Simonetta Amenta purchased the film rights to the story through her company Eurofilm - before Professor Yunus won the Nobel Prize.

In Muhammad Yunus' early efforts to alleviate poverty in the regions near his home, he worked to improve local farmers' crop yields.

Though he succeeded in his short-term project goals, he discovered another problem: a whole section of Bangladesh's poor had slipped through the cracks in poverty reduction programs.

To combat that problem, he researched the poor in the village of Jobra, later redefining the previously vague 'poverty' and developing and studying categories of 'poor people.

For instance, Milford Bateman with the Overseas Development Institute wrote, "When microfinance-funded enterprises are set up, they tend simply to displace other tiny businesses without funding, meaning there is generally no net impact on poverty.

Starting a new business or a basket-making operation or driving a rickshaw required few skills and only a tiny amount of capital, but such a project generated very little income, because everyone else was pretty much already doing exactly the same things in order to survive.