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.
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