Twenty five years ago, Muhammed Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics teacher, was visiting a village when he met a woman who made bamboo stools. She couldn't afford to buy the bamboo to make the stools, so she had to borrow the money from the bamboo sellers and then pay them a large part of the profit from each one she sold. There was so little money left for her to keep that she couldn't afford to buy more bamboo, so she had to borrow more money. And so the cycle continued with no way out for her. She couldn't borrow money from friends or family because they were as poor as she was. She couldn't borrow from the bank because she had no collateral to guarantee that she would pay back the loan.The stool maker needed to sell stools to support her children.