It took the worst floods of the century to bring Bangladesh back into the spotlight of the international media. The sight of so much water just couldn´t be ignored, even by a world weary of a long list of woes. Fortunately, the flooding this year wasn´t followed by something worse, as had happened the last time around in 1988, when an assortment of Western agencies came up with a Flood Action Plan (FAP) and which required a Supreme Court decision to suspend its implementation.
Presumably, thanks are partly due to Bill Clinton´s adulterous adventures, which prevented fertile Western minds from paying too much attention to Bangladesh. That, however, did not spare one of Bill Clinton´s closer friends, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, from undergoing severe scrutiny. Yunus went on international media to say that the entire micro-credit system is under pressure. And it is.
Micro-credit is great but it is not without problems, a fact that should have been noted by the many laudatory reports that have come out on the subject. Now that these problems are surfacing, there is a danger the opposite may happen: people could get hyper-critical. One can only hope that those served by the micro-credit sector will not suffer too much.
In Bangladesh, the poor are so many that there is yet another category below "poor" -the poorest of the poor. These, as it was recently revealed, are the 25 percent of the population who live outside any social service net. Twenty-five percent of 120 million means 30 million people, and the sheer numbers have suddenly made most development success stories appear colourless and false. Neither the government nor the NGOs reaches the doors of these millions with anything but a few grains of wheat. So wretched are they that the glorified micro-credit institutions of Bangladesh, be it the Grameen Bank or BRAC (the world´s largest NGO), will not touch them.