Bangkok  - Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus - who introduced micro-credits in rural Bangladesh - on Wednesday launched a centre at Thailand's Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) that aims to explore new avenues for tackling poverty in the region.

"If you want to see poor people get out of poverty, you have to change the system," Yunus said after the official launch of the Yunus Center at AIT.

Yunus, the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering concept of micro-credits and this year's winner of the 2009 US Presidential Medal of Freedom, has chosen the 50-year-old AIT as his poverty-fighting partner.

"We have challenged the financial institutions who do not lend money to the poor," the well-known professor said of his past successes in introducing micro-credit systems to the rural poor in Bangladesh.

His micro-credit model has now become popular in many developing countries.

"This is particularly remarkable at a time when big banks, with lots of collateral and lawyers around them, are collapsing," Yunus said. "While micro-credit is working everywhere without collateral, without lawyers and repayments have remained as high as ever."

The Yunus Center will provide academic support to new projects that find innovative, sustainable solutions to poverty reduction, food security and environmental degradation problems.

"One thing is clear, and that is the urgent necessity to equip poor communities with the skills needed to adapt to changes both foreseen and unforeseen," AIT's Vice President Peter Haddawy said of the centre's goals.

"The vision of the Yunus Center at AIT is to provide an environment unfettered by constraints of academic tradition in order to think afresh about the needs of society and to develop innovative new models to serve them," he added. (dpa)