The implementation of rural poor programmes in Bangladesh.

This study explores the initiatives of the public and private sector
in the context of the alleviation of poverty of the rural poor in
Bangladesh. The central thesis is that the public sector has made a
significant departure, at least in theory, towards the
conceptualisation of the rural poor programme in a way that the
private sector, particularly the non-governmental organisations, have
been performing for the last two decades.
This study emphasises the recognition by the NGOs, particularly the
"moderate ones, that the nature of both the problems and the
solutions change in the process. Bangladesh Rural Advancement
Committee (BRAC), the "moderate" NGO under study, has gone through a
"learn as it goes", responsive, inductive process. This study argues
quite the contrary with the public sector initiative. It was only
prior to the preparation of the Third Five Year Plan that debates were
initiated to seriously criticise the rather sterile two-tier
cooperative model for rural poor mobilisation around employment
generation and acquisition of assets. Presently, BRDB opened the
"flood-gate", which so long prevented the NGOs to contribute to the
formulation of the training module of BRDB rural poor programme
towards human development and institution building.
Although it has been argued that "moderate" NGOs, like BRAC, are
not institutions setting about to prove a specific model or theory of
development in a dogmatic or absolutist sense, it would be difficult
to say that they are not guided by an ideology, as this study argues,
when the NGOs themselves have accepted the "Freire-type-conscientisation", which in itself is a loaded concept. This study
presents a "mobilising" NGO, where the concept of "conscientisation"
has been shown to transcend the limits of present day thinking of
moderate NGOs.