Finance Minister AMA Muhith has lauded Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus for his initiatives to address the default loan culture of microcredit organisations across the country during 1980s.
Microcredit institutions were really coming out of default loans after Yunus’s initiatives, but the culture of default loan is now prevailing in the country’s commercial banks which is above 11%, he said.
The finance minister was addressing a national convention on microcredit titled “Towards poverty alleviation and social development: The role of MFIs” at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre in the capital.
Muhith said the country’s microcredit culture started 150 years back in the region, but took a long time to get an institutional shape.
Dr Akter Hamid Khan initiated the microcredit programmes that were running three to four sub-divisions while Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman advocated for such programmes immediately after liberation, he said.
The minister said there were a lot of loan defaulters in the microcredit institutions across the country during 1971 to 1980.
While Professor Yunus came in with his Grameenbank idea, it suggested that the poor could also pay back their loan and later other microcredit lenders followed suit, he further said .
“Our poverty reduction programmes have made a good progress as a total of 3.30 of 4 crore poor people are getting microcredit facilities over the last couple of years,” Muhith said.
The finance minister added that there are 3,000 microcredit institutions across the country, but only 700 of them are registered.
“We have been running grant programmes for local NGOs over the last 17 years,” he pointed out.