Who is Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of Bangladesh’s interim government?

()– The Nobel Prize winner in economics known as the “banker of the poor” will try to bring stability to the country after responding to the request of student protesters that he temporarily lead the troubled country after weeks of deadly anti-government demonstrations.

Muhammad Yunus, 84, will head an interim government following the overthrow of the South Asian country’s prime minister and the dissolution of parliament, according to the Bangladesh president’s press secretary.

Yunus is a social entrepreneur and banker who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in microfinance, which helped alleviate poverty in Bangladesh and was widely adopted around the world.

He was also a long-time critic of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who resigned earlier this week and fled the country after years of increasingly authoritarian rule.

Her resignation sparked the joy of the student movement that forced her to leave power, but also some concern about the possibility that the military would intervene to fill the leadership vacuum.

A source told this week that Yunus was in France undergoing a minor medical procedure but would soon return to Bangladesh to take over as interim leader.

The group Students Against Discrimination also confirmed his return, telling in a text message: “We are very happy to say that Dr. Yunus accepted this challenge to save Bangladesh as requested by our students.”

Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, a port city in southeastern Bangladesh, according to his profile in the Nobel Prize website. He studied at the University of Dhaka, before receiving the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University, in the United States, where he earned a doctorate in Economics.

In 1972, a year after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan, he returned to teach at Chittagong University.

But disaster soon struck. A severe famine devastated the country in 1974, killing approximately 1.5 million people.

“I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, against the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty,” Yunus said in his Nobel speech 2006 after receiving the award.

“I wanted to do something immediate to help the people around me, even if I was just a human being, get through another day a little more easily,” he said.

He began making small loans out of his own pocket to the poorest residents of his community, eventually founding the Grameen Bank in 1983, which would become a world leader in poverty alleviation through microcredit.

The bank grew rapidly, with different branches and similar models now operating around the world.

Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, after providing a total of about US$6 billion in housing, student and micro-business loans, specifically in support of Bangladeshi women.

He is also the founder of the Yunus Center, a Dhaka-based think tank that helps develop new social enterprises.

Some critics were skeptical of Yunus and the Grameen Bank, arguing that the high interest rates of some microlenders had impoverished borrowers, as lenders made large profits from small loans.

Yunus disputed these claims, telling earlier this year that Grameen Bank is not out to make money, but rather to help the poor and empower small businesses.

Over the years, Yunus repeatedly clashed with former Prime Minister Hasina, who has accused him of “sucking the blood of the poor.” according to Reuters.

In 2007, Yunus briefly proposed forming a new political party before the parliamentary elections, something that Hasina decried at the time, stating that newcomers to politics were “dangerous elements… who should be viewed with suspicion.” Reuters reported.

Ultimately, Yunus did not go ahead with the creation of the party.

In 2011, Bangladesh’s government-controlled central bank removed Yunus as managing director of Grameen Bank, saying he had passed the mandatory retirement age.

In the years that followed, Yunus became embroiled in multiple court cases that his supporters claimed were because authorities had unfairly persecuted him.

Among them, a defamation lawsuit, a food safety case and accusations of tax irregularities, which he denied.

In January, a Bangladesh court sentenced Yunus to six months in prison for labor law violations, but the banker again denied any wrongdoing.

In another case, he was charged in June with embezzlement.

Hasina’s government had insisted that its actions against Yunus were not politically motivated, but the banker disagreed. It is currently unclear what will happen to these processes now that Hasina has left power.

In February, speaking to while out on bail after appealing his prison sentence, Yunus said the corruption allegations against him were baseless and called them harassment.

“I am not in the political sphere, there is no evidence that I am involved in politics,” Yunus said then, warning that Bangladesh was becoming a “self-destructing civilization.”

In another interview with Reuters in June, he said Bangladesh had become a “one-party” state, with the ruling party ending all political competition.

In an interview with after Hasina’s resignation on Monday, Yunus said he wanted to see the military hand over control of the country to a civilian government. He lashed out at Hasina, saying that “she has tortured us, she has made this country unlivable for the people.”

“People are celebrating in the streets and millions of people throughout Bangladesh [lo están] celebrating as if it were the day of our liberation,” he said.

Addressing his message to the protest movement in Bangladesh, he added: “You have done a great job.”