Jugnoo

I do apologise for the delayed posts, being away for two weeks from work does not help to decrease the workload, quite the opposite.

The adventures in northern Bangladesh continue…

On our second day in Rangpur was, if possible, even more interesting than the first. We headed off bright and early to a village where a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) was being held. A PRA is one of the most popular and successful tools used by development practitioners in surveying new locations and getting a feel for the pressing issues that locals face. Its development agencies realising that local participation and guidance is necessary for long-term success of development. Anyways, the PRA is an essential component of the TUP programme as it is the first step to selecting who the ultra-poor really are. And we had the opportunity to watch a particularly good one. The facilitator was a young Bengali man who was very energetic and very much attuned to the crowd. The PRA began with a mapping of the village. First the major landmarks and ‘roads’ of the village are mapped out, followed by the listing of all the households in the village. After the entire village had been mapped out, the facilitator then moved onto wealth ranking. He started by selecting two households randomly and asking people which one was better off. He also asked them to define what they meant by being better off—i.e. how was one better off? This process would continue till 4 to 6 rankings of wealth were established. These rankings are important because not all development projects are meant for entire villages, the TUP project is one of them; it is targeting the destitute members of the village. Similarly micro finance generally targets the middle/upper class of a village.

PRAs are extremely effective forms of information gathering because they are heavily invested in a participatory approach, forcing the entire village to agree on answers making it difficult for villagers to hide the truth. Let me illustrate; if you decide to garner information by doing surveys on a household level, then there is no checking of answers, there really is no way to verify the truth. On the other hand, in a PRA everyone is sitting together and consensus has to be achieved. Of course, hypothetically, an entire village could be so unified that they could mislead you collectively but that’s statistically improbable and highly difficult to achieve. I know this makes it sound as if I’m calling all villagers/underdeveloped communities liars, I’m not, I’m just saying that people don’t share information especially the underprivileged because of the risk of exploitation. I could simply be posing as a NGO worker sympathetic to their plight when in actuality I am a ruthless land grabber.

Anyways, I digress. Once the PRA was over, we moved on to our next visit. We were now moving away from the direct component of the TUP project to the support services involved. Support services are an essential component of such a project because simply providing assets to the ultra-poor is not enough, they must also be given a chance to let their business flourish and start making a profit so that, in turn, they can start inching their way out of poverty. To do this, one needs to address the many other issues that destitute groups face. For example, if they have no income to provide daily meals to their household, how will they bear the cost of a new enterprise (e.g. feed for livestock, fertilizer for cultivation)? So BRAC provides them with a subsistence allowance, which is not a huge amount of money, but it's a cushion for those who have nothing. They don’t have to use all of the allowance; the money can start off their savings. It is essential to emphasize the importance of savings, a concept that by default cannot exist amongst the very poor (if you barely have enough money to feed yourself, where is the savings going to come from) but is ironically probably the most necessary form of insurance that the poor need to have to prevent crippling debts in the face of unexpected losses.

These are somewhat intangible support services but BRAC also uses of many of its regular services as part of the TUP project. It’s an efficient manner of doing things because there is no point in replicating programmes, which would waste valuable resources and manpower. This includes their health volunteer project. BRAC trains women as health program organizers (these are BRAC employees) who are responsible for various villages. They visit each village regularly to raise awareness about specific health issues and the care and prevention of these matters and are also responsible for community health volunteers. Each village has one woman who has been trained in basic health care, who looks after most of the village’s primary health care. It’s not a new concept or even one confined to Bangladesh, many developing countries have similar projects where cadres of health workers are deployed by NGOs and health ministries as the first level of health care for rural communities. In turn, these workers train local community members to fulfil most of their village’s basic health needs sparing them the need to go to clinics/hospitals for every small issue and, hence, saving them money and time. Such systems also allow for better health awareness in general and safer practices (a community health volunteer tends to be trained in safe delivery practices and is also trained to recognise his/her own limitations and refer patients to a physician when necessary). Decentralising systems such as health and education is necessary for better success in reaching everyone.

While we visited with a health program organizer, we also happened to pass a BRAC social awareness/advocacy session held for rural village women. These are weekly sessions where the women gather in a small group and a BRAC employee discusses various social/legal issues with them raising their awareness about these problems and their rights in such cases. This sort of short information talks occur at many stages in BRAC projects, to ensure that people are becoming well informed and that the message gets through.

After this we headed on to BRAC’s branch office where we lunched and got to see various projects that they run from the branch office, which is located close to many villages and is easily accessible [there are branch offices all over the place ensuring that villagers an get to them easily enough]. Here, there is a government doctor who works on an honorarium basis for a few hours each week after his hours at the government clinics are over and provides the necessary professional care that health program organizers and volunteers simply cannot do.

Also, we got to briefly see the training that TUP members are provided when they first join the project. All new members in an area are divided into their various types of business and are given trainings in these groups. The training itself is for three days and covers the care and management of their asset.

I’m fast coming to the conclusion that BRAC spends a lot of money on its infrastructure, which is great because they’re making sure everyone can get to them. It helps that they are so huge and that they have oodles of money but still, it would be great if other NGOs could do stuff in this manner rather than ferrying field staff back and forth. It would be even better if governments came to this realization and set up services in such a broad manner.

After all this heavy thinking and extensive travelling, our hosts decided that we deserved a break and took us sightseeing to a colonial mansion which has been converted into a museum. On the way to the Zamindar House (Note: zamindar means landowner and tends to refer to feudal landlords, which is an interesting name to give to one’s house! And as a random other note, zamindar is pronounced jamindar by Bengalis who seem incapable of saying “z”), we had a bizarre experience that I still can’t quite believe. We were passing over a stretch of road that was constructed so badly that while it seemed to be perfectly flat and smooth seemed to move the car in the same manner as a boat rolls over the waves! Anyways, the house was beautiful though not so well kept. It had the most beautiful high ceilings with stained glass windows—the old type with thick bubbly glass of translucent jewel tones. The museum objects did not hold much interest because there wasn’t much written up about them and they were rather monotonous which sounds awful coming from an art history major who wants to study it further but I am spoiled in museum settings!

That night, we also got to go see some Popular Theatre, a social programme of BRAC’s. I personally think there’s no project as good at creating awareness as theatre is. Its also great because it provides entertainment for local communities who don’t get it so often. BRAC’s theatre is performed by amateur troupes. The troupe we saw was fabulous even though I didn’t understand a word. But most of the time, language wasn’t much of a barrier—the acting was wonderful. They started off with a song, which apparently consisted of various social messages. The play was also based around social awareness themes but drawn from real life events that have taken place in the village. It was very cute and funny at times but of course had its serious moments. The popularity of the theatre was evident by the sheer numbers of people that attended. Its also telling that clearly there isn’t much in the way of formal entertainment for local communities but that’s unsurprising for any rural community around the world. I think this is also why the theatre is so successful because it manages to reach the maximum number of people.

And so, tired we went back to our rooms…