Senior Fellow David Roodman is quoted in a story on the future of Grameen Bank.
Among organizations operating largely overseas, one that is well known among Americans and generally quite respected is the Grameen Bank, which was founded by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus...Yunus no longer runs Grameen, having been forced out or, more politely, “retired” by the Awami League government of Bangladesh.
Writing for the Center for Global Development, David Roodman suggests that the post-Yunus Grameen might not even survive.The Dhaka government created a commission that reported harsh findings in 2011 about the bank under Yunus’s direction, but Grameen continued its work. Last month, a second commission released a report, this one focusing on whether Grameen was legally organized and whether the board had exercised appropriate oversight.
There were some valid criticisms in the report, according to Roodman, that the board was ineffectual, as is the case with many founder-led boards...Nonetheless, Roodman says that the commission didn’t discover Yunus to be corrupt and didn’t find anything that the organization “illegally” did as meant for anything other than social good. At worst, it concluded that Grameen suffered from what we would call founder’s syndrome.
In the end, Roodman acknowledges some of the good points of the commission report while criticizing its biases and inaccuracies. But he concludes, “The poverty of most Bangladeshi’s being urgent, the eagerness of outsiders to work with the Grameen Bank being great, and the dangers of dependence on the government being obvious, it is understandable that Muhammad Yunus and others at the Grameen Bank pushed the limits of their independence in searching for ways to make a difference.”