Yunus, who is championed in his native Bangladesh as the "banker to the poor," said more of the global development lender's large infrastructure projects should be owned and run by poor local people, not by governments.

"This is an ongoing battle for us," he told a news conference at a global summit on microcredit initiatives being held in this eastern Canadian city.

"We've been raising this issue for a long, long time, that the World Bank repositions themselves where poverty is concerned, so far as development is concerned," Yunus said.

"I have very, very strongly tried to persuade the World Bank to pay direct attention to the poor people," added the Nobel laureate and managing director of the Grameen Bank, which offers loans to impoverished Bangladeshis.

Yunus, 66, said the World Bank's former president, James Wolfensohn, had shown signs of wanting to support the microcredit community, but that "the institution didn't back him up."

The Nobel laureate has been working for decades in Bangladesh to combat poverty by extending tiny business loans, averaging around 100 dollars, so that impoverished individuals can expand a small food or handicraft business.

The Grameen Bank's loans are offered without collateral to people who are often illiterate and have had no contact with the formal banking system. Yunus claims that nearly 99 percent of its loans are repaid.

Yunus says he wants to use his enhanced visibility to expand microcredit projects after he grabbed global attention by winning the Nobel Peace Prize in mid-October.

He has been joined here by Queen Sofia of Spain and government ministers from Canada, Pakistan and Honduras, as well as by UN officials and bankers from Citigroup, ING and Deutsche Bank.

The summit is also being attended by Silicon Valley venture capitalists and some 2,000 microcredit organisers and specialists from around the world.

Campaigners announced a goal Sunday of extending microloans to 175 million people by 2015. They already claim to have extended such loans to some 82 million people since an initial summit in Washington in 1997.

They hope to chip away at the 1.0-1.2 billion of the world's people who struggle to live on under one dollar a day, primarily in Asia.

No senior World Bank official is attending the summit, although there are representatives from the Asian Development Bank and other multilateral lenders.

Yunus said that "not even one percent" of the World Bank's lending of over 20 billion dollars has gone towards microcredit initiatives.

"Their orientation is too different. If you build a bridge, who owns the bridge? Of course if the government take the loan, the government own the bridge," he said.

"I said that's a very old-fashioned formula, why can't the local poor people own the bridge?"

The Grameen Bank has extended microloans to 6.6 million people totalling 5.72 billion dollars, of which 5.07 billion has been repaid. It also offers loans for poor people to build or improve their own homes.

Yunus's new-found celebrity has come as some major corporations ramp up their partnerships with the sector.

French food giant Danone is launching a food company in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank, and US banking behemoth Citigroup has started sponsoring microcredit institutions in India.

Underlining the new corporate interest, this year's summit in Canada is partly sponsored by US agribusiness giant Monsanto and the consumer products group Johnson and Johnson.

URL- http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/11/15/d61115012516.htm