Lessons From The Comilla Experience
Comilla Model provided an experience to be profited by later practitioners. In the early years of BRAC (NGO) and Grameen Bank in the 1970s, both Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Fazle Hasan Abed tested cooperative approaches to delivering credit to poor people. They concluded that the cooperative strategy could not work in rural Bangladesh. Instead, both directly targeted the poorest people, while attempting to keep out those who were not poor.
Dowla & Barua recently summarized the thinking at Grameen Bank:
A major reason for the prior failure of credit cooperatives in Bangladesh was that the groups were too big and consisted of people with varied economic backgrounds. These large groups did not work because the more affluent members captured the organizations.
Later cooperative development initiatives in Bangladesh, like RD-12 and the Swanirvar (‘self-reliance’) Movement also adopted a targeting strategy.
Both Yunus and Abed also attempted to catalyze collective enterprises that were locally owned and controlled. However, problems with internal control and elite manipulation continued, and by the 1990s Grameen and BRAC, along with all the main microfinance NGOs in Bangladesh, had abandoned cooperative approaches and developed highly centralized control and service delivery structures.
Read more about this topic: Comilla Model
Famous quotes containing the words lessons and/or experience:
“That anger can be expressed through words and non-destructive activities; that promises are intended to be kept; that cleanliness and good eating habits are aspects of self-esteem; that compassion is an attribute to be prized—all these lessons are ones children can learn far more readily through the living example of their parents than they ever can through formal instruction.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence.... In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects “Americanism” itself.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)