ABSTRACT
NGO activities began in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the war of independence in 1971 and the famine of 1974, and were initially restricted to relief and rehabilitation. From the mid-1970s there was a shift in focus to integrated community development programmes, heavily influenced by the Comilla model. It was assumed that community development would benefit poor people within communities, but structural constraints prevented the trickle-down of benefits. Through their own field experience, NGOs realised that ‘poverty (was) not simply a problem of income differentials but also of the power relations which constitute rural society’ (White 1992). NGOs therefore began to target specific groups left out of the development ‘net’. The essential premise of the target group approach was that special programmes were required to reach groups excluded by prevailing inequalities in resource endowments, power structures, kinship systems and gender relations. NGOs in Bangladesh therefore shifted their attention from providing straightforward economic benefits, to organising marginalised sections of the population into self-reliant groups capable of resisting structural inequalities. Following the pedagogical approach of Paulo Freire, ‘consciousness-raising’ was adopted as the underlying principle for organising the poor.
