Under threat of jail, microfinance pioneer vows to keep lending to poorest Bangladeshis

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Admin

Muhammad Yunus tells the Guardian charges against him are politically motivated, and expresses concern about personal attacks from politicians

The Nobel peace laureate and microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus has said that years of fighting what he calls “dirty” politically motivated attacks on his work to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh have made life “totally miserable”.

Yunus told the Guardian he had come under 20 years of pressure from the Bangladeshi government for his work, which is credited with improving the lives of millions of poor people, particularly women.

Green growth: the save-the-mangrove scheme reaping rewards for women in Kenya

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Admin

A community project on the Lamu archipelago trains women in preserving this vital ecosystem and provides business loans

Kenya’s mangroves have been harvested for centuries, the timber used in shipbuilding and for ornate doors and furniture as well as shipped across the Indian Ocean and around the world.

The Lamu archipelago accounts for more than half of Kenya’s mangrove forests. But across the country an estimated 40% of this precious commodity has been degraded, as more mangroves have been cut to provide construction materials and charcoal for cooking, and oil leakages from cruise liners and ships that pass along the coast kill off young saplings. The area has become one of the most degraded marine ecosystems in east Africa.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed obituary

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Admin

Founder of Brac, one of the world’s largest non-profit development organisations, which began its work in Bangladesh

When Fazle Hasan Abed set out to lower death rates among poor children in rural Bangladesh, by teaching mothers how to treat dehydration, he was careful not to pay his field workers per household reached, but on how well their subjects, often illiterate or semi-literate mothers, could answer questions afterwards.

His approach, to reward high-quality instruction and rigorously monitor results of a door-to-door pilot scheme in the 1980s, fed lessons from the field back to research labs in Dhaka, and has been credited with saving countless lives from being lost to diarrhoea, a major source of child mortality in the country. It also propelled Brac, which Abed founded in 1972 as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee to help refugees returning to their homeland after the liberation war of 1971, to become one of the largest non-profit development organisations in the world.

Microfinance lenders in Sierra Leone accused of ‘payday loan’ interest rates

Posted on December 12, 2019 by Admin

Borrowers have accused NGOs of charging unfairly high interest, demanding rapid payback, and reporting debts to the police

The world’s largest NGO has been forced to conduct an internal review of a money-lending scheme it runs for the poor in Sierra Leone after some borrowers amassed significant debts and were reported to police when they couldn’t repay loans.

A Guardian investigation into a microfinance programme run by Brac found that the NGO’s staff were failing to fully explain the conditions of the loan to borrowers, or ensure they could afford the high interest rates associated with such loans.