Married at 11, a mother at 12, Shahnaz by rights should be another sad case of a downtrodden woman in one of the world's poorest countries.
Far from it. As the last of a misty morning rain falls, Shahnaz tells how she earns about $4 a day - more than three times the national average in Bangladesh - by selling milk from a cow she owns and by peddling basic medicines to her neighbours.
Now aged 30, she owns a television set, 20 good saris and some gold jewellery. Her most valuable asset, she says, is the education she has been able to give her two sons, aged 18 and 14.
Shahnaz says the reason she's doing better is clear: small loans she has taken out from BRAC, the biggest of a legion of non-governmental organisations that have pioneered micro-finance as a means of helping the poor to help themselves and, in the process, gain a bit more control over their lives.
Bangladesh's micro-lenders make most of their loans to women, figuring they are more likely to spend the profits they make on improving the lot of their families.
Shahnaz, self-confident and direct, could serve as the dictionary definition of this goal of "empowerment" in a country where rural women by tradition were neither seen nor heard.
"If this village has been able to develop it's because of BRAC loans," she says. "Before there was no work, but there's been a great change. Now we have jobs that are bringing us in money."
For many, Bangladesh is still a byword for despair, best known for the floods and cyclones that periodically devastate what is the world's most densely populated country.
Health and education indicators are slowly improving and population growth has slowed. A country that was racked by famine in the years following independence from Pakistan in 1971 is now nearly self-sufficient in food.
But about half of the population of nearly 140 million still lives below the poverty line; six out of 10 are illiterate and only a third has access to electricity.
"We still don't see our society, our state, being able to do much for its poor people," says BRAC's founder and chief executive officer, Fazle Hasan Abed.
Abed created BRAC, which was known then as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, as a relief organisation in 1972.
It has since evolved into a sprawling development conglomerate providing cradle-to-grave services for nearly 120,000 village organisations counting four million households.
Calling itself the world's largest national NGO, BRAC does a lot more than micro-finance. It runs 34,000 primary schools, a university, fish hatcheries, tea estates and a salt factory.
It makes artificial limbs and exports French beans to France and potatoes to Singapore. BRAC contributes more than one percent of Bangladesh's national income and employs over 60,000 staff.
In a 19th-storey conference room in BRAC's Dhaka headquarters overlooking a sprawling slum and a mosque financed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Abed denies his organisation is spreading itself too thinly or growing for the sake of it.
"We shouldn't remain small and beautiful; we should be large and effective," he says. "As along as the government is not able to provide the support our people needs, BRAC is going to do this."
Abed says BRAC does not see itself as competing with the state. But he acknowledges that some lower-level officials might be jealous of BRAC's reach and says there will ultimately be a political impact if it succeeds in raising the living standards and awareness of millions of grassroots Bangladeshis.
"Poor people in the villages haven't started asserting themselves yet. But when they do, then our work will be much more difficult because we will be identified as people who are organising and promoting them," Abed says.
Back in Dowtia, a village about an hour's drive north-west of Dhaka, people power is not in the air. But the story of Renu Begum, like that of her neighbour Shahnaz, points up the deep social shifts brought about by the spread of micro-credit - which in the case of BRAC is extended almost exclusively to women.
Begum is on her fourth BRAC loan. With 17,000 taka ($290) she is buying a cow and a patch of rice paddy. A member of BRAC for 10 years, she has used the money generated by earlier loans to build a small home with its own latrine and tube well; no longer does she face a long walk for water.
A woman with a strong, determined face, Begum explains how her husband, a land-less peasant, used to take all the family's decisions. Now that she is earning quite well, he consults her.
Begum has become so self-reliant that she has been going out to work for the past two years at a textile mill.
She has taken the day off to attend the weekly meeting of the 46 women in her micro-credit group, who have elected her cashier for the year.
BRAC, like its internationally renowned Bangladeshi counterpart Grameen Bank, does not require borrowers to put up collateral for their loans. But despite average interest rates of 15 percent, peer pressure and the discipline of weekly repayments ensure that more than 99 percent of all loans are recovered.
Squatting on a rush mat with loan ledger in hand, each woman passes a small bundle of bank-notes to Begum, who watches with a sharp eye as the BRAC field officer checks the sums. The total payment from the group is 17,000 taka ($290).
For Abed, BRAC's chief, it is scenes like this that ease the pain he feels at the failings of Bangladesh's political classes.
"What makes me most happy is at the very local level, when a woman's eyes suddenly spark up and you see she's doing better. It uplifts you. When you are in rural development and you see individual lives' being changed by your work, you obviously get a lot of satisfaction from it," Abed says.
Comments
Comments are closed.