THE EDITOR, Sir:

Professor Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist, received the Nobel Peace Prize and over 60 other awards for founding the Grameen Bank. This bank is based on the simple but brilliant idea that it is possible to create opportunities for the poorest of the poor by giving them small loans without collateral.

In spite of the scepticism of bankers and other 'experts', the bank has benefited some seven million borrowers (including 85,000 beggars) and, over a period of 30 years, has helped more than half its borrowers rise out of poverty by enabling benefits in housing, savings, pension funds and insurance products. The terms microcredit and microfinancing are now part of the vocabulary of developmental economics. The bank now has branches in over a hundred countries, and it has a 99 per cent repayment rate.

After seeing Professor Yunus being interviewed on television, I wondered if his ideas have had any impact on the Jamaican economic scene. This kind of ground-up strategy seems to me to be much more admirable than the rival trickle down or Robin Hood approaches. It encourages initiative and creativity and develops self-respect.

It also shows that good ideas about development can originate in the post-colonial societies themselves. Surely, Jamaica has the managerial talent and enough people of goodwill to adapt this idea to our own purposes.'Poverty', said Professor Yunus in his Nobel Lecture, "is the absence of all human rights." Like him, we want to put poverty in the museums.

I am, etc.,

EARL MCKENZIE

Department of Language,

Linguistics and Philosophy

UWI, Mona