Shanghai Learning Process: Field Visit to Bangladesh

By
Praful Patel
Vice President, South Asia Region
The World Bank Group
February 24, 2004

Ladies and Gentlemen of the press:

Let me start with few words on why we are here.

The World Bank and the Government of China launched a Global Learning Process in 2003, which would culminate in a Conference in Shanghai in May 2004. The main objective of the Global Learning Process and the Conference in Shanghai is to learn from both successful and less successful attempts to reduce poverty in all its dimensions. In particular the objective is to learn how can countries and communities scale up successful approaches that help improve people's lives? Any hope of meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will depend critically on accelerating results and reproducing them widely across the spectrum.

An important component of this nine-month long global learning process are field visits to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Uganda, Brazil, China, Turkey and Yemen where there have been successful examples of scaling up.

The field visits in Bangladesh:

The Bangladesh visits focused on educational and micro-credit programs as effective, scalable initiatives to promote prosperity and empower poor women. How did these programs become successful over time and across different parts of Bangladesh? To understand these questions, we spent the last three days visiting educational and micro-credit programs in Bangladesh. We also looked at how scaling up Bangladesh's rural electrification program has changed the lives and well-being of poor rural villagers.

I would like to share some of our experiences with you and the important lessons that we take away from our visit.

The day before yesterday, we visited Chindaikona Village to understand how Bangladesh's rural electrification program has changed people's lives. We learned that the poor so highly valued the benefits of electricity that over 98% of consumers paid their bills on time.

At the BRAC Education Program schools in Chak Protha and Goshaibari, we were very impressed with the standard of learning, the dedication of the teachers, and the confidence and intelligence of the young students.

We also visited the Dhunat Pilot Girls High School, one of the sites of the innovative Female Secondary Schools Stipends program, which has successfully scaled up girls secondary education that drew millions of girls into secondary schools and more than doubled female enrollment in these schools.

We attended a BRAC micro-finance meeting at Hatathpara and an Enterprise Organization meeting at Fulbari. We also visited the Madhadpur and Shahrail Grameen Bank Branches. Here we had a chance to speak with borrowers, recipients of Grameen loans for higher education and scholarship recipients, and phone ladies. We also met with Grameen Bank borrowers who have been elected as female Union Parishad members. We were impressed at how the scaling up of successful micro-finance programs has contributed to poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor.

We visited the Bangladesh Rural Development Board's Mominpur Mohila Samabay Samity. I was particularly impressed by the stories of two ladies. One joined the cooperative in 1984. She borrowed TK1,000 and received training at the Rural Development Academy. Empowered, she started a nursery which has grown to 8 acres. She now employs 10 people to help her. Another lady who also received a loan from the cooperative and multiplied her income, has started an NGO to provide micro-credit support to other women. In turn, these women have used the loans to start mini-nurseries. Her annual income is between TK 300,000-400,000. All her four children are in school, with the eldest applying to medical college. Her husband helps to supervise the nursery.

What lessons can we take away with us to share with other communities in other countries?

The most important lesson is that of building partnerships. Neither the NGOs nor the Government can do it all alone. Both the Government and NGO community efforts contributed to the successes of education and micro credit in Bangladesh.

In education, the government provided resources for massive investment in schools, materials, teachers, and administration. The NGOs, reached the poorest and the excluded.

In micro credit, the Government created conducive macro environment and "Hands-off" regulatory policy, and NGOs provided visionary leadership and delivered the services.

Donors played constructive role by providing resources at the appropriate time.

Let me elaborate a little more on these points.

Leadership commitment has been a key to the success of these programs. For example, although Grameen and BRAC were started by very unique individuals, the same level of commitment and leadership is evident at all levels of the organization, from its senior officials down to the village level school teacher and Village Organization member. A core set of organizational values drives these institutions--a corporate culture focused on raising incomes, empowerment of the poor, especially women, and respect for human rights.

The success then will be in replicating this organizational culture elsewhere.

A key factor to scaling up is the ability of institutions to experiment, adapt and innovate in order to meet new development challenges. Grameen, BRAC and other NGOs in partnership with Government were able to transform their corporate governance structures and processes to deliver services on an unprecedented scale, while maintaining the same level of commitment and standards of quality. Critical here is the system of continuous client feedback and program evaluation.

The successful institutions are those that are learning organizations. For example, in institutions like REB, Grammen and BRAC, at a corporate level, this learning enabled them to assume more risk and expand traditional micro-finance functions into a broader range of financial services as well as health, education and even mobile phones.

Finally the external catalysts and the overall environment played important supporting role in scaling up. The Government has allowed these institutions space to grow and develop on their own. The donors provided additional resources. Also the respectable growth in the overall economy and sound macro management has created economic opportunities which support income generating programs funded through micro-finance.