Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a five-part series on the price of freedom, by exploring the work and experience of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh. Deseret News Opinion Editor Jay Evensen has known Yunus since 1997, when the world leader first visited Utah. Evensen traveled to Dhaka to speak again with Yunus, entrepreneurs, politicians in the country, and even revolutionaries seeking change to understand the risks Yunus is enduring and why peace and opportunity in Bangladesh are so important to the United States.

DHAKA, BANGLADESH — It probably wouldn’t take any American long to notice that the nursing college on the outskirts of this sprawling city operates differently than one would in the United States.

The students are dressed in uniforms – blue dresses and head scarves in the official green shade of the Bangladeshi flag for the women, and blue checkered button-down shirts and dark slacks for the men. When I walk into a classroom with Deseret News photographer Scott Winterton and Salt Lake general surgeon Scott Leckman, the 30 or so students immediately stop what they are doing and stand at attention by their desks, facing us with a rapt gaze seldom seen in distraction-laden 21st century American colleges.

But the important differences are more subtle. This is the Grameen Caledonian College of Nursing. It is meant to meet a desperate need in this impoverished country as much as to train bright young students.

It is, as Vice Principal Kazi Shahina explained to us in a briefing before we entered the class, an enterprise designed to become an internationally regarded nursing college in a nation where “nursing is not seen as an honorable profession.”

Why is nursing not honored?

Maybe it’s because, as the World Bank reports, this country has only 0.6 nurses available for every 1,000 people, and average people seldom encounter one. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Utah has 7.26 per 1,000.) Maybe it’s because of old fears generated by a largely unregulated health care industry that allows pharmacies to operate despite dispensing expired or ineffective medicines. Maybe it’s because of a lack of effective training.

Regardless, the effects of this lack of trust are manifest by a statistic we were given earlier in the day — 27% of those who die in Bangladesh each year do so without receiving any medical care.

More than just a nursing college, Grameen Caledonian is a “social business.” Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, the current interim leader of Bangladesh, pioneered the concept of businesses that compete in a free market but whose aim is to solve a social need, not to generate profits for investors. Social businesses do indeed seek investors, but with the understanding that they stand to recoup their investments, plus an administrative fee, and nothing more.

Nothing, that is, except the feeling that comes from making life better for people.

An unofficial estimate by the British Council, Britain’s organization for educational opportunities and cultural relations, said there may be 150,000 various social enterprises underway in Bangladesh. Many more exist in other nations. Exact numbers are hard to find.

Elevating a social good over pure profits cuts against the core motivation behind American business and the idea that market needs can best be solved when consumers gain and entrepreneurs profit.

Still, I can’t help wonder — what if a business were created with the sole intent to save the Great Salt Lake, or to solve homelessness, heart disease or obesity? What if all the profits were dedicated to solving an urgent need that benefitted all? Would Americans, even in the bootstrap culture of the West, rally to the idea?

In one such venture, Yunus partnered with Danone Yogurt to both provide needed nutrition and create employment opportunities. The result was a yogurt rich with the iron, zinc, vitamin A and iodine that was missing in the lives of many impoverished Bangladeshis.

“I have a choice,” Yunus, speaking in general terms about human motivations, told me in an interview, “whether I become the richest man in the whole world, or I can change the whole world.

“Why should I be just the richest person? (Then), nobody cares for me. (Instead), I could change the whole world, and people would think, ‘He’s a great guy.‘”

Capitalism, he said, talks about choices, but the profits-above-everything version of it never grants the choice to pursue something other than money.

Yunus reacts strongly when I press him on the notion, made popular by economists such as Milton Friedman, that all people are motivated by greed.

“That’s absolutely wrong,” he said. “If you take the worst part of it, humans are made up of both selfishness and unselfishness.” People need to discover how much of each part is in them.

Maybe you are 99% selfish and 1% unselfish, he said, but being even just that much unselfish ultimately may influence your selfish part.

“Society’s responsibility is to open the door for everybody so they can explore themselves,” Yunus said. “Education’s purpose should be to find out who you are. What do you want to do with yourself? That’s the question that should be planted in our education system.

“Contributing to the world is a self-discovery.”

It’s clear which choice he believes most people would make after such self-discovery.

Our social business tour includes presentations by Shukhee, a new startup that aims to provide quality health care to all Bangladeshis, including those in hard-to-reach rural areas. The CEO, Dr. Ahmed Atmaan Siddiqui, explains how Shukhee, Bangla for “happy,” includes a smartphone app that gives people instant access to one of several qualified physicians working in a call center. People without smartphone access can contact these doctors via regular landline phones.

A consultation costs the equivalent of 15 cents.

Shukhee hopes to set up reputable pharmacies nationwide, bringing every Bangladeshi within two kilometers of one.

The optimism of Shukhee’s leaders is infectious. We watch as doctors answer calls. We watch humorous television commercials aimed at Bangladeshis who may be inclined to self-diagnose over the internet rather than seek out a physician.

Social businesses often seek partnerships with established companies to help them succeed. The nursing school, for instance, has an agreement with Glasgow Caledonian University aimed at producing nurses and midwives using up-to-date curriculum and professional staff. There are signs that big things are in the works.

Next to the Grameen Caledonian College of Nursing is the foundation of a building the college hopes will become a hospital and medical school, allowing the training of medical students and giving nursing students real human patients, rather than the plastic human-like figures that currently occupy beds.

Back in the classroom, a young man has raised his hand in answer to our question about what he hopes to get from the program. He stands at attention next to his desk and explains how he desires a master’s degree and would like to study in the United States before coming back to Bangladesh to serve.

Others have opinions but are too shy to speak, obviously worried about their English. Many are from rural areas and are learning English for the first time as they study.

This alone — the idea of low-income, rural young people gaining education and skills — seems justification enough for the social business concept.

In his book, “A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment and Zero Net Carbon Emissions,” Yunus explains how “many experts around the world insisted that his social business concept would fail because entrepreneurship is a rare quality in people – and even rarer in poor people, and extremely rare among poor women.”

“I took the reverse position — that all human beings are entrepreneurs, with no exceptions, men or women, rural or urban, rich or poor,” he wrote.

It’s a theme he hits hard in my interview with him, as he has previous times we have met. If it is true, and if enough people embrace it, it could change the world.