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Micro finance

7 October 2005, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Haris, JU
7 October 2005, 18:00 PM
It has been my experience to go to the northern region of Bangladesh and see the ongoing plight of the poor people there. I was at Hatibandha of Lalmonirhat district for couple of weeks to carry out a study over the impact of 'micro finance' -- the very familiar term in the world of NGOs. From September to November people's mobility in this region becomes paralysed because of the lack of any income generating sources. Here people's economy are agriculture based, which is fluctuated with seasonal options. Harvesting season can only minimise the poor people's sufferings for the time being. Before harvesting poor people, specially women and children, and single headed aged people's households become vulnerable and sometimes, their lives surrendered to poverty. It is all about the poor people's misery and fate in the northern part of this country. So what can our civil society, rich people, NGOs and government do? They do not show any lack of sympathy from their respective positions.

Members of the civil society do prescribe to the government and NGOs to do something for helpless people. As per the suggestion, government carries out VGF programme and NGOs provide help like micro finance, micro credit to the 'hardcore poor', 'ultra poor', 'extreme poor' and so on as they label it. Joint efforts from government and NGOs to eradicate poverty in that region should have been no doubt a permanent solution for the ill-fated people. But the fact of the matter is, this effort till date couldn't yield any positive result so that the poor people can say goodbye to poverty.

We all know government's VGF project is not any permanent solution but NGOs' mission, vision and target are completely different there. They speak about the income generation process of the poor people and try to make them well off from the existing situation. But from the grassroots level what does the poor people say about the NGOs' activities? Who are the extreme, hardcore or ultra poor, how do they define that? Do the actual poor people get help from the micro finance business organisations? There are so many questions crying for answer.

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I had few observations out there, which I think are worthy to share with the readers. The local poor people there complain about the NGOs that they provide loan at high interest rate which is not much helpful for overcoming their economic hardship rather it often makes things worse. Poor people say that they had to be pay their loan with even 36%-40% interest rate over tune but they did get little interest from their savings. In this process the poor people's capital invested and the interest goes to the NGOs.