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'Traditional crafts a key to alleviating poverty'
PARIS Feb 8: Muhammad Yunus, founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh yesterday called traditional crafts a key to alleviating poverty dur ing a roundtable at UNESCO headquarters.
UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor hosted the discussion on Traditional Cr afts. Microcredits and Poverty Eradication . attended by Queen Sofia of Spain and Brazilian First Lady Ruth Cardoso
Other participants included Lourdes Arizpe. UNESCO Assistant Director
General for Culture; Marie-Roger Biioa. editor of Africa International: French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac; Dutch fashion critic Lidewlj Edlkoort; Sawada R Ghuznavi, managing director of Aranya Crafts of Bangladesh: Colin Power. UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education; and Aminata Traore, social psychologist and founder of the Le Santoro Cultural Centre in Mali according to a UNESCO press release.
"As Professor Yunus has so powerfully demonstrated, the preservation of crafts is not only a cultural but an jeco-nomic issue. " Mayor said in his introductory remarks to the roundtable, which marked the current United Nations International year for the Eradication of Poverty. "They are often the main products of export from the village and — what is often overlooked — products that substitute for imports They thus make rural life more prosperous and more self re
He praised Muhammad Yunus for realizing that revl iaheed crafts coum help revl
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talise rural life. "He saw the possibilities for empowering and enhancing the status of women — everywhere among the poorest of the poor — through micro-credits for craft enterprises. Above all. he believed in the genius, the resourcefulness and the integrity of the common people.”
Professor Yunus, who established the Grameen Bank in 1983. emphasised that self-employment creates jobs with little capital investment whereas to create only one salaried Job requires much capital investment. "Craft-based self employment is tailor-made to an individual's own ability, so he or she ban start working immediately. he said.
He stressed that the Grameen, Bank's results are not due to charity, but to linking Bangladesh's tradi tional textile industry, which is based on some one million weaving families, to the world market. "We simply showed that our weavers could make a first-rate product at a competitive price.
The roundtable was followed by the inauguration of a week-long exhibit in UNESCO's main hall of traditional Bangladeshi hand loom weaving and samples of fabrics produced through Grameen small-business loans. The evening concluded with a fashion show of hand-woven cotton and silk clothing by Bangladeshi designer Bibi Russell.