South Asia Wired goes on air this week with two stories from Afghanistan and Bangladesh that go against the tide.
When Malalai Joya was elected to the Afghan National Assembly in 2005 she was its youngest Parliamentarian. And perhaps its mouthiest. it wasn’t long before she was banned from the House and had to go into semi hiding in her country. Internationally, she’s a bit of a superstar, but at home she can have neither an office nor a private life because of her refusal to speak out against the warlords – “the wolves in sheep’s clothing” – who rule her country.
And Bangladesh is the birthplace of microcredit, the brainchild of Grameen Bank founder Mohammed Yunus, but the country is still a ways off from reaching Asian Tiger status.
But are things as bad as they seem?
Not really, according to Sajeeda Amin, from the New York office of the Population Council. Compare Bangladesh with its regional neighbours for example and you see that it’s infant mortality rate is half that of Pakistan and its rural infrastructure is far better than that of Nepal.
But microcredit is falling short for the people who perhaps need it the most – the poorest of the poor, the disabled, the widowed, the street dwellers – who “can’t do much with microcredit except consume it”.
Photo Malalai Joya on Flickr by AfghanKabul
