BY DAWN MacKEEN | Laily Begum remembers what it was like to live like an animal -- to spend her nights sleeping in a cow shed and her days begging on the streets of Patira, Bangladesh, eating the scraps of food people handed her. "Nobody helped me before," she says now, looking back. Begum, a 35-year-old mother of three, remembers what it was like to be breathtakingly poor. But in Bangladesh, where more than 50 million people live below the poverty line, Begum was just one of the many.

The only way out of poverty, Begum thought, was to get enough money to buy a cow so she could sell its milk. Needless to say, she couldn't get a loan from a traditional bank because she had nothing to offer as collateral and only a meager income doing housework. It was a stranger from Dhaka who finally helped her -- a man named Muhammad Yunis, who has an unprecedented vision for changing the lives of poor women all over the world.

After hearing about Grameen Bank, which lends money to the poor and was founded by Yunis, Begum took out a loan for 5,500 taka ($119) and bought her cow. Only seven years and as many loans later, Begum has transformed her life. She now moves about her own two-room home -- made of mud, reinforced sticks and a tin roof -- with a cell phone pressed to her ear. The phone is the result of her latest loan, which she has turned into a profitable business of selling phone calls to other people in her village of 10,000.

"People now come to me for help," Begum says through a translator on an early Friday morning phone interview. "I'm self-sufficient and I can feed myself and my family, and now other people look at me and they treat me with respect."

Mention the name Muhammad Yunis to Begum and she pauses for a long time. "He is the one who has made it possible for us to have phones, for us to have cows, for us to change our lives," she says finally. "I have seen him occasionally when he comes to our village."

The truth is, Yunis probably doesn't know who Begum is or exactly how her life has changed over the last seven years. She is just one of 2 million women whose lives have been altered since Yunis founded the Grameen Bank 15 years ago. The bank is a place where Bangladesh's poorest come and are not turned away, for having little or no money is a criteria to become a borrower at Grameen, which means "village" in Bangla. "The fact that somebody is a human being is good enough an introduction for us," Yunis says, and adds fervently that credit should be a human right, not a privilege.

Grameen started as an idea when Yunis left the United States for his native Bangladesh after it became an independent country in 1971. He taught economics at Chittagong University. Yunis had started to wonder if the theories of economics he was teaching were just that -- mere theories, which work only in diagrams on a chalkboard -- when, as he left the classroom each day, he could see people struggling to survive. Yunis started traveling from village to village to learn about real economics.

"One woman that I met was making bamboo stools, and she was making only 2 pennies a day," he says. "And I couldn't believe that anybody could make such a beautiful product and earn so little." The woman explained that she didn't have enough money to buy the bamboo outright, so she had to go through a trader who made her sell the final product back to him for a price that he decided. "And I realized what had happened: She had become a bonded laborer to the trader."

N E X T+P A G E: Loans out of his own pocket