I just had breakfast with Professor H. I. Latifee, the head of Grameen Trust who is also a person of great historical importance for Grameen Bank. He was an economic professor in the department chaired by Professor Yunus in the 1970s. Their visits together to villages near the campus led to several experiments in rural development, one of which became Grameen Bank. Professor Latifee’s easy way with people of all social classes paved the way for fruitful dialogues that identified lack of credit at affordable rates as a key barrier. Today, the Grameen Trust has more than 100 partner microfinance institutions around the world, including quite a few well-known MFIs that are market leaders today (e.g., the Kashf Foundation in Pakistan) that got their first seed capital from the Trust.

Professor Latifee gave me an update of the “build-operate-transfer” projects where they start MFIs on a fast track around the world by deploying Grameen staff for a specific period (after which the organization is turned over to local management and ownership). According to my notes, the approximate outreach of the BOT’s currently underway are Burma: 90,000+ (which has been completely handed over now), Kosovo: 6,000, Zambia: 2,000, Turkey: 4,500, Costa Rica: 1,400, and Guatemala: 800. Discussions are underway to bring this approach to other countries, and the potential is vast.

Also with us at breakfast was Shahjahan, the always pleasant and super-competent chief financial officer of Grameen Bank. He told me that Grameen opened 600 branches this year (surpassing a target of 500) and made a profit of 132 crore taka which is about US$20 million. Grameen Bank had a Board meeting in Oslo on December 9 (since all nine elected representatives from among the clients are here) where, among other things, the 2007 budget was passed. Clearly, the bank never lets a moment pass without doing something to advance its bold anti-poverty mission, even on the weekend it receives the Nobel Prize!

[Latifee and Shahjahan are the two on right of second picture, and are pictured together in the first.]

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