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Afghanistan eyes Bangladesh's Grameen Bank to help poor

Afghanistan may seek to copy micro-credit programmes pioneered by Bangladesh's Grameen Bank to help alleviate crushing poverty in the war-shattered nation, officials said on Wednesday.

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NEW DELHI: Afghanistan may seek to copy micro-credit programmes pioneered by Bangladesh's Grameen Bank to help alleviate crushing poverty in the war-shattered nation, officials said on Wednesday.   

Afgan President Hamid Karzai sought details of the loan scheme during a meeting with Fakhruddin Ahmed, chief of Bangladesh's caretaker government, on the sidelines of a summit of South Asian nations in New Delhi late on Tuesday.   

Karzai "was very impressed with our Grameen Bank and he showed interest in its possible replication," said Bangladesh government spokesman Syed Fahim Munaim.   

Afghanistan was officially accepted on Tuesday as the eighth member of the South Asian Association of Region Cooperation (SAARC) whose two-day meeting was slated to wrap late on Wednesday.   

"The Afghan leader said Afghanistan has been ruined (by war) and needed re-building and asked if Bangladesh could help, especially in the social sector as it had a skilled labour force," Munaim said.   

An aide to Karzai said Afghanistan already had some micro-financing programmes.   

But he said the Grameen Bank "could be an answer" in helping relieve conditions of desperate poverty in the country where an estimated 30 million people live.   

Afghanistan's infrastructure has been almost completely devastated by a series of wars.   

Launched in 1976, the Grameen Bank loans money to poor people to buy their own tools and equipment cutting out the middlemen and helping transform their lives through self-employment.   

Grameen alone has given such loans to more than six million people and the model has been replicated in more than 40 nations.

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