HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.
“O Ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.”
Bahá’u’lláh
A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 71). This blog is a continuation of the review of FREEDOM FROM WANT: THE REMARKABLE SUCCESS STORY OF BRAC, THE GLOBAL GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION THAT’S WINNING THE FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY by Ian Smillie published 2009.
Powerlessness in the face of adversity
Those with land always keep an eye open for new acquisitions, and periods of distress offer real opportunities, driving people from the edge of poverty into deep and permanent misery. The social fabric of the community and families begins to come about at the seams. Men leave, hoping for work in towns and cities. Quarrels over property become acute, violence erupts, and crime grows. The poor depend on the wealthy to provide them with day labor, sharecropping opportunities, and credit. The wealthy, therefore, have enormous influence over the poor, who can ill-afford to do anything that might upset the balance. It is almost inevitable that such relationships will be exploitative. All this leads to powerlessness in the face of adversity, powerlessness in the face of abuse, and powerlessness in the face of criminality.
Powerful men were siphoning off large amounts of relief food
During a 1979 drought BRAC found that small groups of powerful men were siphoning off large amounts of relief food, leading to researchers recording all examples of oppressive, exploitative, and illegal activities. The BRAC findings were far from unique, and were easy to discover by those who took the trouble. Programmers began to discover that if they knew little about the poor, they knew next to nothing about the lives of women, their attitudes, problems, skills, or their contribution to the family and society. In addition to cooking, cleaning, sewing, and bearing and raising children, village women played an essential role in the agricultural life of the family and the village. The pain of hunger pushed away their veil and women spoke not just about how the wealthy controlled all paid labor opportunities in the village, but about how they influenced what women could do if they dared to venture beyond the village.
Chapter 5: Learning and Unlearning
Some parts of BRAC’s new understanding about poverty and the place of women in Bangladesh developed quickly, others took longer. They decided to take on new areas, fearing that a relief mentality might have negative effects on the self-help ethic BRAC was promoting. UNICEF, impressed with BRAC’s education work in Sulla, asked if they would undertake a special program for women in Jamalpur. As it concluded, BRAC saw an opportunity to widen and deepen the program and make it their own. Here they would have a program that dealt exclusively with women, and it would be targeted directly at the poor.
Functional education to the poorest women
The plan was to provide functional education to the poorest women they could find in 28 villages, working with them on health, hygiene, and family planning. It would encourage joint savings and cooperative economic activities, promoting poultry and horticulture. Gone was the idea of making tens of thousands of people literate. Here the plan was for 320 students, no more than 280 cooperative members, and the total budget for the year $10,000. Nobody would be parachuted in; local women under 30 with at least an 8th-grade education would be recruited and trained.
Men think equality humiliates their mastership
Sajeda joined BRAC for a simple reason. It was not to save the world. “It was to save my children.” Although she hoped to train others, she had her own problems in thinking beyond tradition. She said she believed there should be equality between husband and wife in the marriage relationship. But “our society does not believe in it. Men think equality humiliates their mastership.” before it could challenge society, BRAC would have to build self-confidence and self-esteem among its own employees. Each woman would cover two villages, and the best would become team leaders, often chosen by their counterparts. A volunteer would be selected in each village, given training in family planning, hygiene, and functional education in order to provide continuity between visits from BRAC staff. In a 1976 report, BRAC said, “Things worked out more or less as planned.”
Ignorant was not the same as stupid
Mothers were not foolish. They did not go through an endless series of pregnancies simply because there were no pills or condoms. Children were an integral part of the family economic unit, and an insurance policy for the future. Because so many children died at birth and in their first years, parents had to hedge their bets and make more babies than needed. The lesson that BRAC was beginning to learn was that ignorant was not the same as stupid and that real changes in a family’s attitude toward the number of children it wanted went far beyond access to family planning techniques. It was intimately related to health and child survival and the family’s economic well-being.
Microcredit did not exist, nor did Grameen Bank
One hundred and sixteen of the women BRAC worked with in the Jamalpur project were introduced to small income-generating schemes, including goats, rice husking, and potato farming. BRAC abandoned the government’s cooperative scheme and started to form its own co-ops, made up entirely of its target group of poor women. There would be no more hijacking by the village elite. BRAC insisted that a cooperative had to accumulate at least Tk 100 if it were to receive any loan money from BRAC. In those days microcredit did not exist, nor did Grameen Bank. BRAC had to pioneer the idea of targeted lending to poor women alone and without models. Held back by ignorance, tradition, and sometimes malice, women were severely constrained in their investment opportunities.
BRAC was drawn to Manikganj by a famine
BRAC was drawn to Manikganj by a famine, running a food-for-work project. Stunned by what he was seeing, Amin thought and probably hoped that Manikganj would be a short-term assignment. As it turned out, he would stay there for 8 years. It would change his view of the world for ever, and he would eventually rise through the BRAC ranks to become one of its most effective and knowledgeable leaders. With the lessons of Sulla under its belt, BRAC moved quickly from emergency food assistance to development projects. It focused entirely on the poor, setting up functional education centers as a prelude to other activities. It organized village health workers and paramedics who surveyed all of the villages in the area for health problems that could be handled without recourse to doctors and hospitals.
Sustainable empowerment would require more than sloganeering and exhortation
It formed cooperatives, began savings programs, made loans for income generating activities, helped to find new productive enterprises for the landless poor, experimented with poultry, organized pond excavation for fish farming, and discovered a local variety of silk worm that could be raised on castor leaves. All this required testing and retesting and training for ever-larger numbers of villagers. The Outreach Program fostered savings among the poor but there was a high dropout rate from educational classes when participants discovered there was no foreseeable economic benefit. Sustainable empowerment would require more than sloganeering and exhortation.
BRAC’s management culture and understanding of development
The late 1970s and early 1980s were the most important years in the formation of BRAC’s management culture and its understanding of development. It learned about the deep and pervasive nature of rural poverty and understood that external resources, if properly applied, could accelerate development among the poorest, but only if the poorest were directly engaged and treated as adults rather than children. Women occupied a special place in the hierarchy of rural servitude; the importance of experimentation and learning and the application of lessons to new endeavors. Rote learning fails in schools and it fails just as badly in the world of development assistance. BRAC had to be more discerning still about which women it wanted to assist and how. New opportunities had to be devised, but they had to be effective. The first Training and Resource Center (TARC) was built during this period, the start of a training infrastructure that would become essential as the organization grew.