Reducing poverty in Bangladesh will depend critically on sustaining the successes of the country's microcredit (MC) programmes, says Muhammad Yunus, the economist who shared the 2006 Nobel peace prize with his creation, Grameen Bank.

"Microcredit programmes play an important role in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goal-1, that calls for reducing poverty by half by 2015," Yunus told IPS in an interview.

"Poverty in Bangladesh reduced at the rate of one percent per year during the 1990s, and during the period 2000-2005 it declined at a rate of 1.7 percent per year. That makes Bangladesh well-positioned to achieve this MDG," Yunus said.

But, Yunus, who was controversially removed as Grameen (rural) Bank's managing director in March, said there were worries about the future of his brainchild. "We all do hope that Grameen will be able to operate the way it has all these years, but are not sure if it will be able to do so.

"Whatever happens," Yunus said, "we must stand up to protect the rights of the eight million women owners of Grameen, who own 97 percent of its shares and be allowed to choose how their bank shall operate."

Critics say that MC clients, predominantly women, are often indebted through repeated loans and excessive interest rates. They question whether borrowers are really escaping poverty.

But, the mood is upbeat at the state-run MC organisation, Palli Karma Shahayak Foundation or PKSF, which loans billions of dollars annually to roughly 250 active partner organisations (POs) which improved their lending by 15 percent this fiscal over the last one.

source: http://www.muhammadyunus.org/