Can anybody else run Grameen Bank?

GlobalPost
The World

I'm not stumping for Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina or saying there's anything less than admirable about the behavior of Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, but now that the apparent smear campaign seems to be over, with the Supreme Court refusing to let Yunus skate by the country's mandatory retirement laws, I have a question:

Can anybody else run Grameen Bank?

Whether he should be allowed to work past the mandatory retirement age aside, Yunus is 70 years old. He's not going to live forever. Hasn't he been grooming a successor?  Is he the only person who can run a successful microcredit program in Bangladesh?  If so, there's something seriously wrong with the concept.

But that's exactly what his supporters seem to be arguing, instead of moving on to what happens next. 

"The atrocity here is the fact that the independence and integrity of one of the world’s premier poverty fighting institutions is now at grave risk," writes Sam Daley-Harris, founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign. "Grameen Bank, an extraordinary institution with more than 8 million microcredit borrowers that took 35 years to build, could be destroyed in a matter of months by incompetent government action."

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