Nobel Peace Prize: A Big Award for Bits of Credit
But Grameen is not without critics, many of whom focus on the bank's high interest rates. Its business loans carry a rate of 20 percent, significantly higher than the 10 to 15 percent charged by commercial banks.
"While the poor pay 20 percent interest for their loan, the rich pay much less. It can't be called social justice," said S.M. Akash, an economics professor at Dhaka University.
Reports routinely circulate in Bangladesh's media of people being forced to borrow from second or third sources, often at higher interest rates, to repay Grameen loans. But almost no one is willing to be quoted making such criticism in Bangladesh, where Yunus was considered a national hero even before the Nobel Prize was announced.
How much impact Grameen has had on Bangladesh's economy also remains an open question.
Poverty has decreased since Grameen was founded in 1983. Bangladesh's per capita income has grown from $280 in 1985 to $440 in 2006, according to World Bank figures.
While the bank was "a factor" in that success, economists "can't apportion exactly how much credit has to go with Grameen," said Jonathan Morduch, an expert on microfinance at New York University.
And even if per capita income has increased, Bangladesh remains one of the world's poorest countries, a land beset by political unrest and the ever present specter of another military coup.
In fact, the spread of Yunus's and Grameen's microcredit schemes around the world–they are now considered a key approach to spurring development–is arguably one of the few bright spots for Bangladesh since it won independence from Pakistan in 1973.
Worldwide, microcredit financing is estimated to have helped 92 million families last year alone, according to Jove Oliver, spokesman for the Microcredit Summit Campaign, part of the Washington-based Project Results Educational Fund.
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