Muhammad Yunus leaves politics

News from the bbc

Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner and micro credit expert Muhammad Yunus has announced that he has abandoned plans to form his own political party.

In an open letter to his supporters, Mr Yunus said that he did not believe he had enough support for his movement, Nagarik Shakti (Citizen's Power). His party was formally launched in February pledging to clean up politics. Mr Yunus had planned to have candidates standing in every seat in elections for which no date has yet been set.

'Losing enthusiasm'
The vote was put off in January after violence between supporters of Bangladesh's two largest political parties. "I am standing aside from my efforts to form a political party," Mr Yunus in an open letter to the public. "I have seen those who initially encouraged me gradually losing their enthusiasm. "I decided to enter into politics because of your support," he said, "but I came to understand that it is not possible and so accepting this reality I decided not to go forward," he said.

Mr Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which specialises in lifting people out of extreme poverty by giving small loans to the very poor, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October.

'Not interested'

His decision to enter politics followed the crisis in January that led to a state of emergency imposed by a military-backed interim government.

"People gave me inspiration to enter politics (but) when I contacted them I did not get much response and they were not interested in joining the party. Others would not leave their existing political party," he said in the statement.

Mr Yunus said in February that his new party would offer an alternative to the two main political parties - the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League - which have dominated Bangladesh's notoriously corrupt political system for more than 30 years.

But correspondents say that many people questioned whether he had over-estimated his popularity in rural areas, where his bank's high interest rates are disliked.

They also pointed to the difficulty of breaking the Awami League and BNP's stranglehold on power. Bangladesh's interim government has said it will only hold elections once corruption has been eradicated in the country. It has arrested scores of politicians, civil servants and businessmen as part of its anti-corruption drive.


OUr question is, what are the lessons from this failure?
Surely Yunus had the support of the poor of Bangladesh, who revere him for his creation of the Grameen enterprises, the most important of which are the Grameen bank - in spite of his interest rates - and Grameen phone, which have improved the lives of thousands of poor families in the country. He surely also had the support of the world community, who honored him with the Nobel Peace Price last year and who are inspired by his sincerity and humbleness.
But that was not enough to provide a viable alternative to the entrenched power structures of Bangladesh. Goodwill, idealism and broad support, even fame, are not enough if that cannot be translated into political power. (add money for the US).
We don’t know the whole story of why he quit politics, but one thing is for sure: it is a great loss for the people of Bangladesh as well as of other countries.

UC Berkeley ischool year’s end presentations

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the final project showcase of the Masters’ students at School of Information at UC Berkeley. The 15 projects, most of which entailed a software program of some form or another, spanned a wide variety of areas, reaching from more customer-friendly business registration services for the Californian government to several project to improve communication and evaluation within the university to a web-based collection browser for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UCB to an online marketplace for the food industry.

Of particular interest to us were the two projects in the ICTD area, the Field/Mice Project by Andrea Moed and Owen Otto, which presented an English-language learning video game in which students using multiple mice on one PC learned to collaborate and take turns. With the help of Microsoft and the TIER program at UCB, Andrea and Owen went to Bangalore and tested the game in a number of government schools with 100 children aged 10 to 13.

The second project, called REACH, by Rowena Luk, and also supported by TIER, used a user-centered design approach to develop a software that allowed for social networking among Ghanaian doctors at home and abroad. The system emerged from the insights of several weeks of fieldwork in Ghana, that revealed the tight social network among doctors in Ghana, who use an informal social network to fill gaps in the existing medical infrastructure. Such a human-centered approach is also at the heart of our work, and our methodology of Human-Driven Design and Research (HDDR), which we teach through workshops and white papers.

While we enjoyed all of the presentations, and getting some hands-on playtime afterwards, we were left wanting for projects that really push the envelope in HCI and CRD. If graduate school is not the time to explore the edges of established practices, then when?