New Agenda of Life for Sweeping Poverty Away

A. Rural Development Program

A.1 Institutional Building

Most of the sub-programs under Rural Development Program (RDP) offers different program supports including credit services to the Groups. Community participation is the pre-requisite element for any development initiative. BEES initiates organizing groups with the aim to bring the people having similar socio-economic status on the same platform for ignition of development process.

The target people are landless or own less than half an acre of land and earn their living by selling manual labor. Groups are formed through mobilizing the mentioned target people with the assistance of BEES staff giving priority to women’s participation. These groups form the nucleus of all the activities of BEES in general and micro-finance operations in particular. The usual group size under RDP is 25-30 members. In case of micro-enterprise development program, the group size is restricted to 5-10 members only, because, this sort of program demands personal attachment and individual attention from the responsible field staff.

BEES is to organize and form groups and thus building their own organizations. Groups are set-up to develop well-disciplined organization of the rural and urban poor and capacity of the poor for sustainable development. The group has two broad objectives; i) economic – and ii) social development. Towards achieving the objectives, BEES arranges two types of training courses for group members, Human Resource Development and Occupational Skills Development in addition to necessary financial support to beneficiaries so that they can utilize the loan money properly. The former includes social and legal awareness education including gender awareness, leadership development and planning & management etc. The later includes a variety of courses on agriculture, poultry and livestock, women employment generation, micro-enterprise, social forestry.

Once the groups or individuals of the groups exhibit their maturity and competence to undertake a project, they qualify for receiving loan from Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) under this program.

Through institutional development upon group formation, BEES ensures contributory and dynamic participation from each of the members. The united efforts of the group members encourage them to take challenges and fight back the poverty. BEES creates realization among the target groups of their needs and basic rights and; inspire them to find way out with innovative ideas to open up new dimension of life. Gradually the process leads to claim and establish their rights through empowering of these marginal people especially the women. The social and economic emancipation of the target groups is imminent now.

Achievement

During the reporting period July 2002-June 2003 a total of 3,971 groups have been formed comprising 65,918 members against the targets of 5,164 groups and 86,755 members which indicates about 77% and 76% achievements respectively.

The fund (RLF) constraint has been identified as the main reason of low achievement in terms of formation of groups and enrollment of new members. Due to not having fund as planned, new groups could not be organized as per the annual target. Similarly BEES could not continue with the old groups as targeted, since a mentionable number of groups were broken, as they could not get any enhanced new loan from BEES due to fund constraint.

Male-Female Participation in Group Formation

Among the enrolled members, a total of 10,070 were female who were organized in 685 groups and rest 2,980 male members were in 185 groups.

Thus about 82% members were female while the rest 18% of the members were male.

Cumulative Experience of BEES to Work with Groups

At the end of the reporting period, a total of 129,420 members covering 55,399 groups have been continuing.

Of the total working groups, 6,536 constituted 122,884 female members, while 51,850 male members are of 3,549 groups under RDP.

It is observed that there are 95% female and only 5% male group members continued with BEES program.