Microfinance Under Fire

Microfinance has bored the brunt of some harsh criticism recently, most notably from Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheik Hasina Wazed, and his attacks on 2006 Noble Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus. An opinion article on Yunus' unwarranted plight appeared in The New York Times on Monday, March 21:

Anyone who cares about international development, microfinance or social entrepreneurship should pay attention. The Grameen Bank is not just the largest microlender in the world, with 8.4 million borrowers (most of them women villagers) who received more than $1 billion in loans last year, it is the flagship enterprise in an industry that, in 2009, served 128 million of the world’s poorest families. It is also a leading example and inspiration for millions of citizen-led organisations that have been established in recent decades to address social problems that governments have failed to solve.

The Problem: (Bangladeshi) Government officials initially seized on a Norwegian documentary that accused Yunus of improperly diverting funds in 1996 that had been donated by the country’s aid agency. The Norwegian government investigated and found that, while funds were transferred internally from one Grameen-owned affiliate to another, there was no indication that the funds were misused. Since then, government officials have engaged in attacks against Yunus and challenged the work of all microlenders in Bangladesh.

Some of these attacks, mind you, have been nasty, vile and wholly undeserved.

a Nobel Prize winner for his work on poverty alleviation has now been called a "blood-sucker" and his life-long work described as mere entrapment of the poor towards greater indebtedness. In a virulent attack on the man who captured the imagination of the world with his model of collateral-free banking that gives small loans to the rural poor, making illiterate women recipients of 95 per cent of his loans. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last December accused Prof. Mohammad Yunus of deception, of doing business with the lives of the poor, of treating GB as his personal property, and of misleading the government about his activities.
 

Earlier this month Yunus was forced out of the bank he founded. He has since taken the case to the Bangladeshi Supreme Court.

On March 15, the Bangladeshi Supreme Court postponed ruling on Yunus’s case for two weeks. Hopefully, common sense will win the day and a solution will be reached so that this vital institution — and the millions of villagers who depend upon it for their livelihoods — are not jeopardised.

UPDATE

Bangladesh's Supreme Court adjourned a hearing Tuesday on whether Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who has fallen out with the government, was illegally removed from his pioneering microfinance bank.

Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his concept of small cash loans to help tackle poverty, did not attend the hearing, at which he is appealing against a central bank order which sacked him from Grameen Bank.

"Our legal team sought more time to prepare our case and to allow discussions to continue," his lawyer Tamin Husain Shawan told AFP.

"The hearing has been adjourned until April 4. We were seeking a four-week deferment but the Supreme Court turned this down."

The United States warned last week that ties with Bangladesh could be affected if a solution was not found to the clash between the government and Yunus, who is celebrated worldwide for his work helping the poor.

Yunus, 70, was dismissed as managing director of Dhaka-based Grameen Bank last month in what his supporters said was the culmination of a political vendetta against him.

He has defied the central bank order, returning to work at Grameen's headquarters and lodging the appeal contesting his dismissal.

Supporters of Yunus claim the economist was ousted from the helm of his own bank after falling out with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina when he set up a short-lived political party in 2007.