Nicola Banks

The Role of NGOs and Civil Society in Development and Poverty Reduction

Abstract Since the late 1970s, NGOs have played an increasingly prominent role in the development sector, widely praised for their strengths as innovative and grassroots-driven organisations with the desire and capacity to pursue participatory and people-centred forms of development and to fill gaps left by the failure of states across the developing world in meeting the needs of their poorest citizens. While levels of funding for NGO programmes in service delivery and advocacy work have increased alongside the rising prevalence and prominence of NGOs, concerns regarding their legitimacy have also increased. There are ongoing questions of these comparative advantages, given their growing distance away from low-income people and communities and towards their donors. In addition, given the non-political arena in which they operate, NGOs have had little participation or impact in tackling the more structurally-entrenched causes and manifestations of poverty, such as social and political exclusion, instead effectively depoliticising poverty by treating it as a technical problem that can be ‘solved’. How, therefore, can NGOs ‘return to their roots’ and follow true participatory and experimental paths to empowerment? As this paper explores, increasingly, NGOs are recognised as only one, albeit important, actor in civil society. Success in this sphere will require a shift away from their role as service providers to that of facilitators and supporters of broader civil society organisations through which low-income communities themselves can engage in dialogue and negotiations to enhance their collective assets and capabilities.

Neglecting the urban poor in Bangladesh : research, policy and action in the context of climate change.

In Bangladesh, urban poverty is neglected in research, policy and action on poverty reduction. This paper explores the underlying reasons for this relative neglect, which include national identity and image, the political economy of urban poverty and the structuring of knowledge creation. It argues for more comprehensive policy and programmes for the urban poor given Bangladesh’s increasingly urban future and the growing magnitude of urban poverty. The impact of climate change will accelerate Bangladesh’s ongoing urbanization as well as deepen the scale and severity of urban poverty. The fact that reducing urban poverty will be increasingly important in meeting national goals for poverty reduction means that policy and action must pay more attention to the urban poor. This is contingent upon two factors: first, a better understanding of the scale and nature of urban poverty and vulnerability; and second, the confrontation of powerful interests necessary to secure a national commitment to urban poverty reduction.

A tale of two wards: Political participation and the urban poor in Dhaka city

This paper investigates the extent of political participation of the urban poor in Dhaka, identifying the actors with whom the urban poor interact for problem solving and gaining access to services. Through a comparison of the different experiences of “active” and “non-active” poor residents across two wards, the research identifies barriers to effective political participation; it then considers how opportunities for participation can be advanced. The experience of the Coalition for the Urban Poors (CUP) Basti Basheer Odhikar Surakha Committee (BOSC) illustrates how collective mobilization of the poor has been successful in incorporating the urban poor into municipal governance. However, alongside its successes, the research investigates constraints to such initiatives in terms of securing national commitment to urban poverty reduction.

New development alternatives or business as usual with a new face? The transformative potential of new actors and alliances in development

The state, market and civil society constitute the three main institutional domains of the ‘development’ landscape. Perceptions of these three actors have evolved over time alongside conceptualisations of what constitutes and best promotes ‘development’. The array of contributions in this special issue points towards a worrying implication for the transformative potential of development activities and interventions. While the new diversity in actors and alliances brings new opportunities for development, we see the majority placing the responsibility for development in the hands of the state and market. Furthermore, the hollowing out of civil society – apparent from the lack of priority given to it in the Global South and the promotion of development as ‘responsible consumerism’ in the North – represents a missed opportunity for consolidating the progress made in the commitment to poverty reduction since the UN Millennium Declaration. Reaching greater transformative potential would require focusing as much on inclusive social development as on inclusive economic development. Doing so would tackle the big questions of power and inequality that remain among the root causes of poverty today.

Female employment in Dhaka, Bangladesh: participation, perceptions and pressures

As urbanization changes the face of poverty in Bangladesh, endemic insecurities within the urban environment force low-income households to deploy new strategies of labour mobilization that challenge traditional patriarchal ideologies, and in the process, gender dynamics. The research reveals the complex balance male household heads face in meeting economic and social priorities. While the majority of households depend on female labour mobilization as a short-term means of survival, this comes at the cost of displacing longer-term goals of household advancement, given that status, prestige and social networks are dependent on the ability to uphold patriarchal norms that forbid women from working. While most men hold on to patriarchal beliefs – viewing the mobilization of female labour as a “necessary evil” that dampens household honour and prestige and threatens masculinity – women are aware of the importance of their work and the centrality of their contributions to income. These opposing perspectives generate tensions within the household, leaving women to face a complex balance between managing the household, their jobs and the marital relationship. A wife’s labour is often viewed as a threat to male dominance and authority and can lead to various negative behaviours by the household head, including reducing working hours and income contributions or taking a second wife. A paradox is visible, in which men are aware of these negative tendencies but do not associate them with their own marital problems, instead blaming wives for their “disobedience”. This may be one reason for the persistence of patriarchal social norms that frown upon sending married women to work while, at the same time, it has become widely acceptable to send young, unmarried daughters, who do not offer the same challenge to authority, to work in Bangladesh’s thriving export-oriented garments sector.

Urban poverty in Bangladesh: Causes, consequences and coping strategies

Abstract Bustees are places where physical, social, economic and political vulnerabilities collide, creating a multi-layered blanket of vulnerability for their residents. Although income is central to day-to-day survival in an urban environment in which cash income is needed to meet a household’s basic needs, work options are limited to low-paid and irregular work, primarily dependent on physical labour. This forces households to rely upon loans and labour mobilisation strategies to get by. Unsanitary, poorly serviced, and densely populated environments – frequently situated in environmentally hazardous areas – mean ill health is both endemic and chronic, playing a routine and devastating role in the lives of the urban poor. The repercussions of resource scarcity at the household level are compounded by the social and political exclusion of the poor from urban governance structures and processes. Amidst a lack of formal institutional support, and in the absence of formal rights and entitlements, the process of facilitating and maintaining patron–client relationships is a central coping strategy for the urban poor. It is a means of trying to manage uncertainty and improve their access to resources. For the majority, however, these strategies are limited to helping households to cope, rather than advancing their interests. Informal systems of governance at the bustee level reproduce and exacerbate existing inequalities, with access to power, information, resources, employment and other lucrative income-generating opportunities limited to a close circle of wellconnected bustee households.

Livelihoods Limitations: The Political Economy of Urban Poverty in Bangladesh

Frameworks for understanding urban poverty have taken an asset-based approach that assesses livelihoods strategies on the basis of a household’s portfolio of assets. Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh reveals the limitations of such approaches. Their narrow focus on households and depoliticized definition of social capital may capture experiences of urban poverty, but cannot reconcile these with the significance of the structural drivers of urban poverty. Our understanding of urban poverty must recognize the informal systems of governance that dominate resource distribution at the community-level and keep the resources necessary for household improvement confined to a relatively small elite. Excluded from the accumulation networks that provide a platform for household mobility for the well-connected, most urban poor households are reliant upon survival networks in their search for security. Only through extending our analysis beyond the household to explore their position within this local political economy can we recognize the significant limitations placed on their efforts to extend and improve their livelihoods.

Youth poverty, employment and livelihoods: social and economic implications of living with insecurity in Arusha, Tanzania

The youth employment crisis in sub-Saharan Africa’s towns and cities is among the region’s top development priorities. High rates of youth under- and unemployment create significant obstacles to young people’s ability to become self-reliant, a crucial first step in the transition to adulthood. It is important to explore how local and global structures and processes create the hostile economic and social environment in which urban youth search for livelihoods. Only then can we identify the ways in which urban poverty brings insurmountable constraints on youth agency. We must understand the multitude of obstacles facing urban youth in their quest for decent work and secure livelihoods, how these differ by gender and educational status, and the implications of this for their longer-term social and economic development. This paper attempts such an exploration in the context of Arusha, Tanzania.

What Works for Young People's Development? A Case Study of BRAC's Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescent Girls Programme in Uganda and Tanzania

Abstract On the record of poverty and inequality in India over the last thirty or so years, the general scholarly view seems to be that there have been substantial declines in money-metric poverty, that there has been no significant over-time increase in inequality, and that the growth in per capita consumption expenditure has not been marked by any discernible evidence of non-inclusiveness. It is argued in this paper that inferences of this nature are largely a consequence of the particular approaches to the measurement of poverty, inequality and inclusiveness that have been generally adopted in the literature. Alternative, and arguably more plausible, protocols of measurement suggest a picture of money-metric deprivation and disparity in India which shares little in common with the product of received wisdom on the subject.

Exploring the Success of BRAC Tanzania’s Microcredit Programme

Abstract This paper explores the growth of BRAC’s microcredit programme in Tanzania and some of the variety in and patterns of that growth. BRAC’s microfinance programme has grown dramatically and significantly within Tanzania and serves tens of thousands of women across large parts of the country. We examine quantitative data from April 2011 to April 2013, and use observation of groups and client and staff interviews from 2012-2013 to explore that success. We argue that the growth is based upon its effective marketing strategy and the fundamental usefulness of BRAC’s loans to its clients. But the findings also show that members were leaving at the time of the research. This could reflect a number of dissatisfactions that BRAC’s clients have with some aspects of BRAC’s microfinance products and the performance of its staff. The staff problems are confirmed by the staff themselves, both senior and junior. They are consistent with failings, across all of Tanzania, with respect to training and capacity in the finance and microfinance sectors generally. They also reflect the difficulties of cross-cultural adaptation, and learning to work in Tanzanian contexts (for Bangladeshi staff), and learning to work in a Bangladeshi organisation (for Tanzanian staff) that were current at the moment we conducted our observations. The interesting development, which has happened rapidly after this research concluded, is that BRAC’s staffing has changed significantly, with many more senior Tanzanian appointments. This may have considerable implications for the continued development of the organisation.