We don't micro-credit it

Glasgow and surrounding parts of western Scotland have some of the worst pockets of poverty in Britain. Life expectancy is below the national average and some families have been on welfare for three or four generations.

Mohamed Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winning economist, hopes to raise £1m ($1.56m) in coming months to open the first European branch of his Grameen Bank in Glasgow by the end of the summer. Under its business plan for Glasgow, which will be overseen by experienced managers from Bangladesh, Grameen expects to raise £3m over three years and lend an average of £1,000 to 1,500 borrowers at an interest rate of 19.8% a year.

Rushanara Ali, the Labour Party’s spokeswoman for international development, welcomed the symbolism of experts coming from a developing country to share their knowledge “If they’ve got solutions that work somewhere else, it doesn’t do us any harm to look at how we adapt them,”

Unfortunately Yunis mico-credit schemes are NOT the panacea for poverty. Thomas Dichter of the Cato Institute - “In Bangladesh, 30 years after Yunus’s invention, poverty statistics are worse than they’ve ever been, so something else is the source of the problem and micro-credit is not helping.”

And Socialist Courier asserts that the source of the problem is property, not the lack of riches. Private property and poverty are twins born of the division of society into classes. To end poverty you have to end private property and wage-slavery.

See our companion blogs related posts.

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/11/yunis-and-micro-credit-myths.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/08/microfinance-fails-poor.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/05/poverty-of-micro-finance.html http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2012/03/micro-credit-bubble.html
http://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2007/12/can-ethical-capitalism-work.html
http://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2012/01/micro-debt-slavery.html