Bangladesh’s economy is on a positive trend. It is growing and expected to maintain this trend to reach a stable position. IT and industrial growth is moving on the right track. Many areas have developed enormously particularly in the last couple of years; they are garments, livestock, tea, IT and many more. The standard of living has improved in the last few years with a steady growth in employment. Bangladesh is gradually integrating with the world economy and the process will continue positively with the change of domestic and external circumstances.
Trade with its neighbors is also maintaining healthy balance. Bangladesh can offer passage to some regions, which are land locked so that they can have access to the sea and this way can forge a partnership benefiting it and the regions’ economies too. Chittagong port is a natural outlet for the landlocked states. Intra-regional trade within SAARC countries constitutes only 3 percent of the total trade, while among ASEAN countries it is 25 percent and within European Union 50 percent.
To correct the imbalance in the regional trade, SAFTA (South Asia Free Trade Agreement) is a milestone in the economic profile of SAARC. With the SAFTA the member countries will bring down their tariffs step by step and this will help trade to grow equitably.
Bangladesh needs larger market access for its goods. This is an excellent opportunity for the country’s trade and a platform to sell its goods in the region improving its share in the region’s trade.
Over the past 25 years, the private sector has been creative and imaginative and making the most of the available economic opportunities. They have invested in multitude of areas e.g. chemical fertilizer, basic engineering, pharmaceuticals, textiles, ceramics, tanneries, plastic, agriculture, agro products and in ready made garment industries-. Successive governments have laid emphasis on export led industrial growth.
Providing credit and organizational support for the poor have been key elements of many nongovernment organization’s approach to poverty reduction and improving livelihood. It is an accepted fact that resource-poor rural households need affordable credit to enhance household incomes.
It is essential to incorporate the poor who constitute more than 60 percent of the population in the national drive to eradicate poverty, which is solely responsible for slow development of the population’s potential, and efficacy. The Grameen Bank has developed a successful model of extending credit to poor households and mostly the women members. The model is now being replicated in a large number of countries all over the world. The fundamental features of the model are: an organizational structure that ensures that clients belong to the economically and socially disadvantaged groups, a credit delivery system that is designed to be simple and adaptable to cater to the needs of the poor, a built-in savings mobilization component that enhances self-reliance and provides cover against business risks and vulnerability from natural calamities and a self-empowerment mechanism that provides women an opportunity to assert themselves in the household and the society. The experience of the micro credit programs in Bangladesh and elsewhere demonstrate that reaching the poor with credit is not difficult, the poor utilize the credit for investment in activities that generate regular incomes, most of the loans are repaid in due time, and the borrowing households continue to take larger repeat loans and gradually improve their economic conditions. Some borrowers turn into successful entrepreneurs generating employment for other poor people. The NGOs operating the micro-credit program have also generated substantial employment for the educated labor force for servicing the program, which is tremendous benefit for countries like Bangladesh which faces monumental problem of providing employment foraying people graduating from colleges and universities. The micro-credit program in Bangladesh may have generated employment to about 40,000 youth with Higher Secondary School certificates and to another 10,000 college and university graduates. Grameen Foundation uses micro finance and innovative technology to fight poverty and bring opportunities to the world’s poorest people. With tiny loans and financial services, the poor, mostly women, start businesses and escape poverty. 90 percent of micro-credit borrowers are women. Micro-credit borrowers have used the funds to start small grocery shops, set up trading activities, rear cattle and poultry, farm fish, and start up businesses such as tailoring, rickshaw pulling, paddy husking, among other activities. Micro-credit has significantly helped improve their lives:
Recently micro credit has come into the limelight with the awarding of Nobel Peace Prize to Prof. Muhammad Yunus. The concept of micro credit to the poor without any collateral is Avant Garde concept and with this the banking sector has received a big jolt revolutionizing the concept of banking. The idea is to provide loan to the poorer of the poor who have no collateral and therefore no access to loan facilities. This is an effort to bring them out of their abject poverty and help them to lead a normal life and to better the living conditions of the family by providing nutrition, education and developing their skills and potentialities to lead a developed life.
Now it has been accepted that economic emancipation and peace are interlinked. To bring the majority of the people mired in abject poverty out of their deprivation and help them lead a developed and healthy life by being a partner in national development activities is the underlying idea of this method: Poverty leads to social malaise and malediction jeopardizing peace and stability whereby the economy in general suffers and the country plunges into disorder leading to deterioration of the overall conditions of the people.
So, it is imperative to address this issue and there can be nothing better than reaching out to the people through micro credit and giving them access to knowledge and information to improve their conditions. Knowledge conflated with finance and information is the key to development. If we jettison this idea we are inviting more discontent and restiveness, which can put all efforts to failure and uncertainty. Grameen Bank has today more than 65 lakhs subscribers who play a pivotal role in the mobility of finance and the movement of markets contributing to the growth in the socio-economic conditions and the improvement of family life. This will impact education positively, raise awareness regarding trade and other important dynamics, which are the integral parts of a developed society.
There are different NGOs working on this line. By providing financial support they are not only improving their economic conditions but also contributing in bolstering their confidence, developing their personalities and changing their psyche and mindsets. These are no mean achievements.
