Bangladesh: new initiative to combat malnutrition

This story of mine was recently published by IRIN, the UN's humanitarian news service:

DHAKA - There have been mixed reactions to a private-public partnership to popularize a nutritional supplement known to reduce the incidence of anaemia in infants and young children.

The supplement, known as Sprinkles, is a blend of powdered micronutrients which, when sprinkled onto food, provides children with all the necessary vitamins and minerals.

Renata, a leading generic drugs manufacturer based in Dhaka, will produce, market and sell the food supplement alongside BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), the biggest NGO in the developing world, and the Social Marketing Company (SMC), a not-for-profit enterprise.

But the cautious Bangladeshi government has declined to comment on Sprinkles or its promotion. Fatima Parveen Chowdhury, director of the government-run Institute of Public Health Nutrition (IPHN), explained that since Sprinkles is a new product, the government would only be in a position to comment once its effect on Bangladeshi children had been established.

Read the rest here.

Micro-credit bubbling over in South Asia?

Microfinance has been the in thing in the development world for quite some time, with Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for setting up Grameen Bank, the man of the moment.

But an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal suggests that a microfinance bubble could be forming in India (the story is behind a paywall here but I've pasted the intro below).

The WSJ story seems to tally with what I heard when I was in Bangladesh back in June. One businessman who ran a charitable foundation told me that his organisation was having to move away from micro-credit provision because the market was so saturated.

While the idea behind microfinance was that it would provide poor entrepreneurs with access to much needed funding, in reality the rapid expansion of credit was driven by consumer spending on new TVs and mobile phones.

It's hard to argue that individual Bangladeshi or Indian farmers shouldn't be lent money to buy things that make their lives more enjoyable but we all know the risks of rapidly expanding credit to fund additional consumer spending.

RAMANAGARAM, India -- A credit crisis is brewing in "microfinance," the business of making the tiniest loans in the world.

Microlending fights poverty by helping poor people finance small businesses -- snack stalls, fruit trees, milk-producing buffaloes -- in slums and other places where it's tough to get a normal loan. But what began as a social experiment to aid the world's poorest has also shown it can turn a profit.

That has attracted private-equity funds and other foreign investors, who've poured billions of dollars over the past few years into microfinance world-wide. (See related article "For Global Investors, 'Microfinance' Funds Pay Off -- So Far" -- WSJ August 13, 2009.)

The result: Today in India, some poor neighborhoods are being "carpet-bombed" with loans, says Rajalaxmi Kamath, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore who studies the issue. In India, microloans outstanding grew 72% in the year ended March 31, 2008, totaling $1.24 billion, according to Sa-Dhan, an industry association in New Delhi.

"We fear a bubble," says Jacques Grivel of the Luxembourg-based Finethic, a $100 million investment fund that focuses on Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, though it has no exposure to India. "Too much money is chasing too few good candidates."

Dhaka Street View

A little video I took with my Creative Vado HD, while traveling through the bustling backstreets of Dhaka last week. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

Bangladesh's divided society writ large on the clogged streets of Dhaka

It used to be said that the British class system resembled that found on the country's trains: three distinct classes, open to all according to their ability to pay.

Similarly, Bangladesh's divided class system is replicated in the creaking Dhaka transport system.

The poor are forced to sweat it out on the city's 500,000 cycle-rickshaws and thousands of battered old buses, while the rich have their cars and jeeps, complete with a hardy driver able to negotiate the chaotic traffic.

Most people I spoke to in Dhaka, from businessmen to NGO workers and tuk-tuk drivers, agreed that their city was split between the very rich and the very poor, with a small middle class.

The motorbike, long the symbol of the growing middle class in countries like India, Indonesia and Vietnam, is hardly anywhere to be seen in Dhaka.

One by-product of this bizarre combination of large cars and buses and countless slow-moving rickshaws is total gridlock on the streets apart from on Friday morning, when people sleep in or go to the mosque.

It can easily take over an hour to travel a couple of miles so, on days when I had a number of meetings spread across this sprawling city, I probably spent half my time traveling.

There is, however, one up-side to this dire situation. As one entrepreneur told me, "you can't use the excuse that you're late because of the traffic, because it's always terrible".

What the papers say, Bangladesh-style

To give you a flavour of what’s going on in Bangladesh, I thought I’d highlight some of the more interesting stories from the New Age, a local English-language paper.

• The clocks are going forward by one hour tonight in a move designed to ensure more daylight during business hours and reduce electricity – having experienced the incredibly frequent and frustrating rolling blackouts during my few days here, I agree that something needs to be done about the acute power shortage. However, I find it slightly disconcerting when governments start to mess with time.
• There is increasing opposition from the business community in Dhaka to the government’s plan to “whiten black money”, allowing the crooked and the corrupt to avoid legal sanctions if they fess up and pay tax on their ill-gotten gains, albeit at a lower rate than the normal income tax. Rouf Chowdhury, the industrialist I spoke to earlier this week, is one of the few open supporters of the amnesty. His view was basically that everybody is a little bit corrupt so it’s pointless having absolute standards.
• The New Age’s rather basic magazine supplement contained a good feature about a new extortion scam that is targeting Bangladesh’s many garment manufacturers. But, in a very Bangladeshi twist, instead of trying to force the manufacturers to hand over cash, the organized criminals are demanding jhoot, the material off-cuts that can be used to make mattresses and pillows. This is a serious business and those who refused to co-operate have received death-threats. It says a lot about a country when crime syndicates are willing to murder someone over a few bags of rags. The fact that there is a market for such products also says a lot about the resilience and ingenuity of the Bangladeshi people.
• The other story that caught my eye was the death of a cattle trader who was shot by an Indian border patrol, presumably while crossing between the two neighbours illegally. He was one of many that have met such a fate this year, in a sign of the persistent suspicion between these two nations. It’s a pretty extreme response to illegal border trade, of the kind that you’d expect from North Korea, not India.

Why Bangladesh doesn't want your pity

Bangladesh: land of desperation, starvation and floods of biblical proportions, beloved and pitied in equal measure by the legions of NGO workers who flock here. At least that’s how it’s normally portrayed.

Coming to Bangladesh for the first time, I’ve got a rather different view from many of the people I’ve spoken to. While poverty is ever-present and the country is hit by devastating natural disasters on an annual basis, many Bangladeshis are proud of the progress their country has made since independence in 1971 and are none too pleased with the perception that they are nation of pitiful wretches.

One senior public health expert I spoke to explained that during recent cyclones Sidr and Aila, Dhaka residents had taken it upon themselves to travel down to the affected regions in the south and give out food packages to those in need.

Rouf Chowdhury, an influential, Oxford-educated businessman, chided the West for failing to give Bangladesh credit where it was due.

“Our population has doubled to around 150 million since independence and yet, in a country the size of the state of Maryland, we have managed to become self-sufficient in food,” he explained in the scruffy boardroom of the Bangladesh Vegetable Oil Refiners Association, which is one of the many organizations he chairs.

“That’s a minor miracle and that makes me confident and optimistic about the future.”

For the official low-down on the comparative area, check out the invaluable CIA world factbook, which says that Bangladesh is slightly smaller than Iowa (and Cambodia, Oman and Suriname).

The pic shows fancy new lakeside apartments facing off against not-so-fancy lakeside slums in central Dhaka - although I'm told that these slums are of the comparatively upmarket variety.