This book illustrates the uncertainties of the lives of the inhabitants of ‘Char’ lands (reclaimed land) in Bangladesh. Flooding and riverbank erosion are endemic features in the areas close to the major rivers in Bangladesh. The rivers also throw up fertile lands that cause violent clashes between competing camps. Such violence has been examined against the backdrop and compulsions of cropping phenophases. With the help of several case studies, the book describes the survival strategies of the ‘char’ lands.
In recent years the term social protection has gained currency in developmental discourse: encompassing the range of protective transfers, services and formal and informal safeguards that are available to protect people in need or at risk of being in need. Whilst migration offers a safety net for poorer people in search of alternative or supplementary livelihoods, it also deprives many, of access to formal and informal sources of support. Social protection concerns emerge at all stages of migration: before departure, in transit, at destination and upon return.
Over the past decade or more, Public Interest Litigation (PIL) has seized the imagination of judges, lawyers and human rights activists throughout South Asia. It has opened new avenues for access to justice, to legal remedies and catalysed innovative responses for protection of basic human rights, including economic and social rights.
Keynes once wrote that economics is "a difficult and technical subject, but nobody will believe it". It is frustrating for people to find debates on economic policies too technical and inaccessible, since it is their lives that are affected by these policies.
IRBD reports represent a pioneering research initiative undertaken by the Centre for Policy Dialogue and gives an independent analysis of Bangladesh's development efforts. CPD's first volume on Experiences with Economic Reform: A Review of Bangladesh's Development 1995 was very well received and has been extensively used by politicians, experts, and policy makers to the point where it has by now become an essential reference point as well as a source of influence on public opinion.
The current volume on Quality of Public Investment in Bangladesh embodies the results of a set of in depth surveys carried out by the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) in order to examine the quality of design, implementation and monitoring of eight of the major public sector undertakings in Bangladesh. Whist an executive summary of the major findings of this pioneering investigation has appeared as a separate chapter in Growth or Stagnation?
Providing microcredit to the poor has become an important antipoverty scheme in many countries. Microcredit helps the poor become self-employed and thus generates income and reduces poverty. In Bangladesh, these programs reach about five million poor households. But microcredit programs are just one of many ways of reducing poverty. Are these programs cost-effective? This book addresses the question, drawing on the experience of the well-known microcredit programs of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, the Rural Development-12 project, and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.
Among the major socio-economic objectives of national development policy in Bangladesh is to ensure that developmental benefits do not accrue only to privileged sections in the community but percolate to the underprivileged social sections as well. However, the working of the institutional credit structure has yet to be evaluated against this principle in order to ascertain the extent to which the credit flow to agriculture has reached to unprivileged sections of the rural community, comprising the country's small and marginal farmers.
In this book of three essays (emerging from lectures at BRAC University and Bangladesh Economic Association), Professor Nurul Islam examines the opportunities as well as risks Bangladesh faces in foreign trade, investment and labour export, first in the context of economic globalization and then in the regional context, in forging mutually beneficial economic relations with India. The book also contains an empirical analysis of Bangladesh's international image-in respect of economic performance and state of governance- with a significant bearing on her development prospects.
BRAC, arguably the world's largest and most successful NGO, is little known outside Bangladesh where it was established in 1972. Author Ian Smillie predicts, however, that this is bound to change. BRAC's success and the spread of its work in health, education, social enterprise development and microfinance dwarfs any other private, government or non-profit enterprise in its impact on tens of thousands of communities in Asia and Africa.