Continuing Debates
The merits of poverty-targeting continue to stimulate debate in microfinance. While many microcredit institutions have adopted poverty-targeting, most cooperatives reject it. The 1st principle in the Statement on the Co-operative Identity affirms that cooperatives are open to all persons in a community. Poverty-targeting is seen as ‘reverse discrimination’ on the basis of social or economic status.
In this view, the main problem with the Comilla Model was that it neglected the 4th cooperative principle: independence from government. This neglect is clearly visible in the Khan’s initial design of the Model, since the cooperatives were conceived of as an instrument for maintaining public infrastructure, and were dependent on the delivery of government extension services and credit for their success. Cooperatives however, have fallen prey to elite capture in many oral communities, and in less densely populated nations than Bangladesh, it still proves challenging to deliver microfinance to them.
Read more about this topic: Comilla Model
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