This is an Assignment on The Role of NGOs on Poverty Alleviation in Bangladesh & the Lacking of Bangladesh Government to Alleviate Poverty

1. BRAC University
POL101- Introduction to Political
Assignment on
The Role of NGOs on Poverty Alleviation in Bangladesh & the Lacking of
Bangladesh Government to Alleviate Poverty
Submitted to:
Meheri Tamanna
Senior Lecturer
Department of Economics & Social Sciences
Submitted by:
Md Al Emran ID: 14301030
Md Mehrab Hossain ID: 13101043
Abrar Fiyaz Alam ID: 16309020
Akram Masud ID: 13101005
Md. Asra-Ye-Mobas Sharin ID: 13321061

2. Introduction:
Like other countries, Bangladesh is also facing some socio-economic problem. In the
context of Bangladesh, its rural crisis is more a vital issue in addition to that. Being one the
poorest nations of the world, a large portion of its people live below the poverty line who are
mostly uneducated and uninformed. They also outnumber the accessible assets and openings
for work. Bangladesh government with its limited resources can't able to help them to come
out from the helpless life. Considering this, numerous Non-Governmental Organizations
normally known as NGO have approached and come forward to help rural as well as vulnerable
people of Bangladesh.
Role of NGO:
It is without a doubt to state that NGOs with their productive endeavors have been
advancing improvement key by making interesting changes in the field of monetary advance in
Bangladesh since her autonomy. About 2553 NGO’s are present in Bangladesh which work for
this country's betterment.[1] NGOs started their journey shortly after the 1971 liberation war.
In Bangladesh NGO's have various vital role such as-
● Poverty alleviation
● Education
● Standard of Living
● Development agriculture
● Health care
● Gender equity
● Raising fund
● Socio economic development
Grameen Bank:
Grameen Bank started as project in Chittagong, 1976.[2] It was started by Muhammad
Yunus, a college educator at Chittagong University in eastern Bangladesh to give moderate
acknowledge and credit to the poor as a wish to reduce poverty from Bangladesh. Yunus had
watched that the poorest of the poor had no entrance to business credit and were along these
lines being deliberately misused by moneylenders in the customary currency markets, which
additionally exacerbated their neediness. The task started by giving little guarantee free credits
to the poor for money producing exercises picked by the borrowers themselves. It mainly
provides micro credit to the rural poor mainly to the women. Its main difference from the

3. commercial bank is Grameen Bank loans need not to be secured by collateral. Role of Grameen
Bank such as-
Micro Credit:
It is a program that provides small loans to poor people for self-employment and
income generations for living a standard life.
Micro-Finance:
It is a program which provides loans for self-employment and other business including
both saving and credit aspect of the program.
Strategies for poverty reduction:
Grameen Bank trusts that absence of access to credit is the greatest limitation for the
provincial poor. In the event that the poor are given credit on sensible terms, they themselves
best know how to expand their wages. Grameen Bank targets and activates poor people and
makes social and money related conditions so that they receive credit by identifying a source of
self-employment. The Bank's strategy for focusing on the poor is powerful as it activates just
the individuals who will bear the expenses of gathering development, preparing, and observing
each other's exercises, and the individuals who are happy with the moderately little sums they
can borrow and repay. To better meet its definitive objective of social and monetary
improvement, Grameen Bank targets ladies more than men. Thusly, it specifically channels
credit to the poorest and the slightest enabled and enhances the expectations for everyday
comforts of their families. Alongside giving credit, Grameen Bank offers rules to individuals for
implicit rules and exercises went for enhancing their social and budgetary conditions. It
additionally gives preparing to ladies in maternal wellbeing, sustenance, and childcare to create
more prominent interest for fundamental medicinal services administrations.
BRAC:
BRAC is an international development organization, which is, situated in Bangladesh.
Having larger number of employees as of September 2016, it is the world’s largest
nongovernmental organization.[3] After the independence of Bangladesh, in 1972 Sir Fazle
Hasan Abed established BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee).As of now it is
situated in 64 districts as well as 11 other countries.[4] It intends to reduce the poverty
problem of the country. For that reason after the liberation war, it started working to help the
people who were below the poverty line. By giving free education, proper healthcare, skill
development training and small amount of loans which helps them to improve their

4. condition.BRAC operates a huge number of programme to the development of Bangladesh such
as-
Specially Targeted Ultra Poor (STUP):
This programme targets those who are below the poverty line. After knowing those
people they grant them productive assets, give life skill training, enterprise development and
give them personalized healthcare.
Other Targeted Ultra Poor (OTUP):
This programme also serves the ultra poor people and they also belong below the
poverty line but they are marginally less deprived compared to others. They get the same help
but they get small loans to buy assets rather than grant assets.
Strategies for Poverty reduction:
BRAC mainly intervenes in the lives of people who are struggling to get over the poverty
line. BRAC helps to improve their situation by giving them certain opportunities. First of all,
BRAC ensures free education so that they can learn and help themselves out of their poor state.
Secondly, they grant small loan to buy assets or grant them certain assets to improve their
economic condition. Thirdly, they give life skill training to help them develop their inner
potential. Lastly, they ensure personalized healthcare to ensure they can have a healthy life,
which will keep them motivated in general tasks. They also ensure women empowerment by
giving women working opportunities so that they can also help in their family economy. This
finally results in improvement in their financial state. Due to the intervention of BRAC, a large
number of people have come out of the poverty line. In addition, they help those who get
affected by any natural disasters and ensure that they do not suffer due to this disaster. In the
end, BRAC ensures these steps in order to eradicate poverty from our country.
Odhikar:
In 1994, a group of human rights activists initiated discussions and underscored the
need to uphold the civil and political rights of the people of Bangladesh along with social,
cultural and economic rights. Eventually, a decision was arrived at to form an organization in
order to advance such rights. On October 10, 1994, Odhikar (a Bangla word that means ‘rights’)
came into being with the aim to create a wider monitoring and awareness raising system on the
abuse of civil and political rights.[5]
Objectives:
The principal objectives of the organization are to raise the awareness of human rights
and its various abuses, on the one hand and create a vibrant democratic system through

5. election monitoring on the other. In Bangladesh, women, children, religious and ethnic
minorities are among the groups that are most vulnerable to human rights abuses. It realizes
that empowerment is the precondition to establish human rights, which is based on a
recognition and faith in people’s own power and resources. With this in mind, Odhikar is
working with the vision of “society where full enjoyment of human rights by every human being
will be ensured”.
Activities:
There are numerous activities of Odhikar such as-
● Research:
Research Team at Odhikar is responsible for the archival preservation and
enhancement of the fact finding reports. This involves the inclusion of legal rights,
available data and statistics from previous years and recommendations into the main
text of the fact finding reports as well as translation and editing work
● Documentation:
Odhikar has a Documentation Team that keeps the organization updated with
human rights abuses published in the major national dailies. Key topics are Extrajudicial
killings, Torture, Human rights violations at the Border, Violence against women (Dowry,
Rape, Acid, Stalking) etc.
● Advocacy and Networking:
Through regular campaign and discussion meetings on various issues of human
rights and their abuse, Odhikar brings together various groups of people, including
policymakers, politicians, law enforcement agencies, lawyers, human rights activists and
NGO activists, journalists from various media and victims of human rights abuses.
● HRD Training:
Since 2000, Odhikar trained more than 500 Human Rights Defenders from
various districts of Bangladesh with the support of different donors/partners, including
the American Centre, Forum-Asia, Relief International, European Union and the Finnish
NGO Foundation for Human Rights. The aim of the training programs were to create a
grassroots and local human rights defenders network for mobilizing people in order to
strengthen the social movement against human rights violations.
● Media Campaign:
Media plays a vital role in monitoring and promoting human rights. The data
collected by the organization are published is both Bangla and English language dailies
on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Articles written by both staff and members of

6. the organization are published in special edition pages and legal rights supplements of
national dailies as well.
Odhikar has been able to establish itself as one of the leading human rights
organizations of the country. It has developed a strong network of partners and human
rights defenders not only all over Bangladesh, but also in the region.
Lacking of government:
The NGOs are playing a vital role for the development of Bangladesh in numerous field
but the government is not playing his role accurately. There are some more issues that
government has failed to develop and the NGOs are playing an excellent role to develop.
Women empowerment:
In our society, women are vulnerable of different forms deprivation and exploitation.
NGOs of Bangladesh are attempting to make himself-independent, so that they may develop
their households and the nutritional standards of their kids. To illustrate, 97 percent loans in
2017 of Grameen Bank has taken by women which they used to do small business like poultry
farming, sewing etc. [6] Thus, Government should ensure more opportunities and securities for
women in our country.
Poverty Alleviation:
In reply of poverty alleviation, about 1000 NGOs are involved in microcredit programs.
[7] For instance, in Grameen Bank, about 8.902 million people have taken loans to improve
their livelihood within 2016. [6] Here, government has to advance their scopes for fighting
poverty efficiently.
Education:
To create a strong and progressive nation, we should take education as a higher priority.
Though our government is trying to improve the current situation, still that’s not enough.
According to a ‘‘The Daily Star” report, Bangladesh literacy rate is 72.3 percent in 2016. [3] Here
NGOs and government both are stepping up. For instance, in BRAC School alone, about 20,982
children attend school every day and for higher education Grameen bank has given loans to
52,000 students. [10] [7]
Health and family planning:

7. In rural areas, people are not aware about health and family planning, as a result we often see
rapid growth of child marriage and maternal death etc. [6] For example, from BRAC health
program, about 431,310 patients has been treated within Nov, 2017. [10] Indeed, government
needs to increase more hospitals and awareness campaign to tackle health issue properly.
Climate risk reduction and emergency response:
During natural calamities such as floods, cyclones, cold spells etc., many NGOs directly involved
in providing disaster relief by giving them temporary shelter, foods, medicine. For instance,
PROSHIKA and CARE takes different initiatives like emphasis on social forestry and organic
agriculture to confront the climate risk and also provide relief to the victims of disaster.[13] [12]
Unfortunately, most of the cases we see the weakness of government in confronting any
natural calamities.
Conclusion:
Albeit there are some limitations, the NGO’s are working positively and have been
accepted as an effective tool for poverty alleviation and development of our country.
Bangladesh govt. has given top priority for poverty reduction. But it is quite impossible to
reduce poverty single handedly. So government is working together with different NGOs in
rural areas to make the people self-employed. Here microcredit of different NGO’s is the most
important weapon for poverty reduction. We hope that if concerted effort is made, poverty can
be reduced significantly in Bangladesh.
References:
1. List of Total NGOs in Bangladesh(2017),NGO News, Latest NGO News, Fund for NGO, NGO
News Update [Online] Available at: https://ngonewsbd.com/ngo-list-of-bangladesh/
2. Grameenfoundation.org (2017) ,History | Grameen Foundation | Connecting the World's
Poor to Their Potential [Online] Available at:
https://www.grameenfoundation.org/about/history
3. Brac.net, BRAC ranked number one NGO in the world(2017)[Online] Available at:
http://www.brac.net/component/k2/item/978-brac-ranked-number-one-ngo-in-the-world
4. Brac.net (2017), BRAC: Creating opportunities for people to realise potential, [Online]
Available at: http://www.brac.net/#who_we_are
5. Odhikar.org, Odhikar | About Odhikar,[Online] Available at:http://odhikar.org/about-
us/about-odhikar/

8. 6. Grameen.com. (2017). Breaking the vicious cycle of poverty through microcredit | Grameen
Bank. [Online] Available at: http://www.grameen.com/breaking-the-cycle-of-proverty/
[Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
7. Grameen.com. (2017). Grameen Bank’s profit rises, interest declines | Grameen Bank.
[Online] Available at: http://www.grameen.com/grameen-banks-profit-rises-interest-declines/
[Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
8. The Daily Star. (2017). Adult literacy rate rises. [Online] Available at:
http://www.thedailystar.net/editorial/adult-literacy-rate-rises-1425580 [Accessed 27 Nov.
2017].
9. Response.brac.net. (2017). Aid for the people from Myanmar in Bangladesh. [Online]
Available at: http://response.brac.net/ [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
10. Brac.net. (2017). BRAC Education Programme. [Online] Available at:
http://www.brac.net/education [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
11. Brac.net. (2017). BRAC Health, Nutrition and Population Programme. [Online] Available at:
http://www.brac.net/health [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
12. Proshika. (2017). What Proshika does. [Online] Available at: http://www.proshika.org/what-
proshika-does.html [Accessed 27 Nov. 2017].
13. Care Bangladesh.org. (2017). What We Do | CARE Bangladesh | Defending Dignity. Fighting
Poverty. [Online] Available at: http://www.carebangladesh.org/our_work.php#sc_4 [Accessed
27 Nov. 2017].