Muhammad Yunus, an OSI grantee, and Grameen Bank, the institution he founded, have been awarded a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting economic and social development. OSI's Economic & Business Development Program (EBDP), the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), and OSIAF-Turkey have collaborated with Grameen on various projects over the last seven years, primarily through the Grameen Foundation-USA.

• In 1999, the Soros Economic Development Fund made a seven-year, $10.6 million loan to Grameen Telecom, an offshoot of Grameen Bank.  The loan expanded Grameen Telecom’s “village phone” program, which provides small loans, mobile phone technology, and business training to poor entrepreneurs in isolated villages in Bangladesh.  These village phone operators, all of them women, use the loans to establish private pay phones, renting out their mobile phones to their neighbors.  The “village phones” not only provide income to the operators but also bring telecommunications services to villagers who would otherwise have to travel great distances to conduct business.  To date, Grameen Telecom has provided 120,000 village phones in over 38,000 villages.  In 2004, SEDF converted the loan to a guarantee, and in June 2005 Grameen Telecom repaid the underlying loan in full, one year ahead of schedule.
• In 2001, OSI made a $10,000 grant to the Grameen Foundation-USA to conduct an assessment on establishing operations in East Timor.
• Also in 2001, EBDP made a $250,000 grant to the Grameen Foundation-USA to help scale up its microfinance operations in India.  In particular, the award allowed a Grameen affiliate in India to meet the minimum capital requirements to become a licensed, regulated financial institution and achieve financial sustainability.
• In 2003, OSIAF-Turkey granted $300,000 spread out over 3 years, to provide the necessary start-up funding for a newly-established Grameen affiliate in Diyarbakir called the Turkish Grameen Microcredit Project (TGMP).  TGMP currently serves more than 3,000 clients.
• In 2005, EBDP made a $50,000 grant to the Grameen Foundation-USA to support its expansion to the Dominican Republic, a country where one third of the population lives in critical poverty.  With average loans of less than $200, Grameen’s affiliates in the Dominican Republic serve over 7,200 families and aim to reach 30,000 families in the next four years.