NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNERS MUHAMMAD YUNUS AND THE GRAMEEN BANK

That this House congratulates Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize `for their efforts to create economic and social development from below'; recognises their pioneering work in the field of microfinance, whereby the world's poorest people are able to lift themselves out of poverty through small business loans; notes that microfinance has enabled nearly 100 million people to escape poverty and to improve their nutritional wellbeing, educational access and gender parity within their family and local community; and calls on the Department for International Development to give higher priority to microfinance in order to achieve one of the major Millennium Development Goals, that of cutting absolute poverty in half by 2015.