Grameen Bank Brand Guidelines: Jobra 1976, a 1983 Bank & the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

A university research project in one village.

Grameen Bank began as a piece of field research. The bank’s own website says the Grameen Bank project started in 1976 as an action-research pilot in Jobra, a village in Chattogram district, run with a national commercial bank and the University of Chittagong. English Wikipedia names that bank as Janata Bank and describes the founder, Muhammad Yunus, as a professor at the university who set out to study how credit could be delivered to the rural poor. The bank’s page on its founder says a loan from Janata Bank in December 1976 allowed the work to expand as an action-research project of Chittagong University.

The name is a plain description. Grameen is Bengali for “rural” or “village,” the bank says, so the full name reads as village bank. English Wikipedia says the project reached other villages near Jobra over the next two years, and in 1979, with support from the central bank, Bangladesh Bank, it was extended to Tangail District, north of Dhaka. Other districts followed over the next few years.

The bank itself dates from 2 October 1983, when, English Wikipedia says, a government ordinance converted the project into Grameen Bank. NobelPrize.org gives both dates: founded in 1976, with Yunus establishing the bank in 1983. The bank’s website pairs “Since 1983” with the line “A bank for the poor,” and its browser title reads “Grameen Bank – Bank for the Poor.”

Its legal form is unusual. English Wikipedia calls it a statutory public authority and says most of its equity is owned by its borrowers, most of whom are women; the government held 60 per cent in 1983, a single-digit share by the early 2010s and 25 per cent by the mid-2010s. In 2013 the Grameen Bank Act replaced the 1983 ordinance.

Centres, weekly meetings and the Sixteen Decisions.

Grameen Bank’s method is the core of its identity. The bank says no collateral is required for its loans, and that all banking transactions except loan disbursement take place in borrowers’ meetings at village-level centres, organised by centre managers, rather than in branch halls. English Wikipedia describes the system as solidarity lending in groups, with weekly instalments and fairly long loan terms, and notes that there is no formal joint liability: repayment rests with the individual borrower, though a group with a member in default receives no further credit.

The centres also carry a code. Borrowers recite the Sixteen Decisions, a list of commitments on family life, schooling, housing and savings, which English Wikipedia says were updated to Eighteen Decisions in 2023; the bank’s website still lists “16 Decisions for Poverty Alleviation” alongside “10 Poverty Alleviation Indicators.”

The product list has grown well beyond the first small loans. The bank’s website names a Basic Loan, a Microenterprise Loan, a Housing Loan and a Higher Education Loan, among many others, together with savings products such as the Grameen Pension Scheme and a loan-insurance scheme. English Wikipedia says a programme for beggars, now called the Struggling Members programme, began in 2003 with small loans outside the group system; the bank says these loans are interest-free.

Housing has a design record of its own. English Wikipedia says the bank won permission for housing loans after several applications to the central bank in the mid-1980s, that its housing programme received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1989, and that its Low-cost Housing Program won a World Habitat Award in 1998. It also lists the 1994 Independence Day Award, Bangladesh’s highest state award, and a 2004 Petersburg Prize for the Village Phone programme.

Scale figures come from the bank itself. As of August 2026 it reports 2,568 branch offices, 40 zonal offices and 25,090 employees, with 10.63 million borrower members, 97 per cent of them women, in 81,678 villages, or 94 per cent of the country’s villages. NobelPrize.org recorded more than seven million borrowers in 2006.

How microfinance lenders present themselves.

Microfinance lenders present themselves less through products than through method. Grameen Bank’s website opens on its line “A bank for the poor” and describes loans made without collateral, with all transactions except disbursement handled at village-level centres. ASA International sets out the “ASA Model” on a page of its own, from the size of a branch to the rhythm of weekly or fortnightly collections. For these institutions the method is the brand.

Their websites are built around networks and products. They publish branch, client and village counts as dated figures, offer branch locators, and list named loans for small businesses, crops, livestock, housing and education, alongside savings accounts, pension schemes and insurance. Newer pages describe digital wallets and digital financial services, sometimes launched market by market. Where a lender’s pages show small shops, farms or field officers at work, this guide describes them in words rather than reproducing them.

Documentation is a large part of the look. Lenders publish annual reports, monthly reports, governance pages and pages on social performance or impact, and listed groups add investor sections and regulatory news. Regulators are part of the picture too: in Bangladesh, the economist Mustafa K Mujeri wrote in The Daily Star in 2025, non-governmental lenders are licensed by the Microcredit Regulatory Authority, set up under an act of 2006. Claims about what microcredit achieves are the lenders’ own, or those of prize committees and researchers, and are contested in the research literature.

This guide reads each lender from its own pages and from dated outside sources: who founded it, how its lending works, and how its name is used. The palettes here — warm oranges, greens and blues — are our own unofficial interpretations, not the lenders’ published values, and no logo, photograph or document is reproduced.

A Nobel Peace Prize shared with its founder.

The bank’s international profile rests on one date. On 13 October 2006 the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 would be divided into two equal parts, between Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below,” according to NobelPrize.org. The committee’s press release called the bank “a source of ideas and models” for microcredit institutions around the world. English Wikipedia says that at the ceremony at Oslo City Hall on 10 December 2006 the prize was accepted on the bank’s behalf by one of its borrowers, an elected member of its board.

The Grameen name now covers more than the bank, which matters for anyone handling the mark. English Wikipedia lists over two dozen organisations in the wider Grameen family, among them Grameen Telecom, Grameen Shakti, Grameen Trust and Grameenphone, as well as Grameen Motsho and Grameen Krishi, the fisheries and agriculture foundations the bank’s founder page says were set up as separate entities in the late 1980s. The bank’s own website is grameenbank.org.bd.

Its governing law has changed again. English Wikipedia describes a proposal reported in January 2025 to lower the government’s stake from 25 to 5 per cent and to reduce the number of government-appointed directors. The bank’s website publishes a Grameen Bank (Amendment) Act 2026, gazetted on 10 April 2026, beside the 2013 Act.

The bank presents itself through documents as much as images. Its website offers monthly reports, annual reports and a historical data series from 1976, pages on its training institute and an international training programme for visitors, and a notice board in Bengali and English.

For a design guide, Grameen Bank shows how a lender can make its method — the village centre, the weekly meeting, the recited decisions — the centre of its identity. Compare ASA, the Dhaka lender that took a different route, and Kiva. For this guide we use a paddy green, a terracotta and a harvest gold on cotton with a plain serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Grameen Bank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.