Nobel laureate blasts WB

DHAKA—Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus told the head of the World Bank on Sunday that its failure to modernise anti-poverty lending programmes and include more local input has made its work ineffective.
The “World Bank was created nearly 60 years ago. In this 60 years the world has changed a lot, but the World Bank has not changed its style,” Yunus said after meeting new World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who is visiting Bangladesh to review lending programmes.
“It was created to eradicate poverty. It cannot achieve the objectives for which it was created,” Yunus said. “I’ve told them that you’ve forgotten the people. If you cannot involve the people in your work, poverty won’t be reduced.”
Yunus was honoured with the Nobel last October for his Grameen Bank which specialises in lifting people out of extreme poverty by giving them small loans, a formula that has been replicated around the world.
Yunus told Zoellick, who was on a two-day visit to the impoverished country, that the World Bank should carry out wide-ranging reforms including giving more freedom to local administrators of its programmes. “Its country offices sit like a post office. They wait for the orders from” the headquarters.