| Shrnutí: | The Jamalpur Flood Rehabilitation Project (JFRP) was designed to provide flood
rehabilitation to women who were not targeted in the previous ECHO/NOVIB/BRAC
flood rehabilitation project of 1998/1999, in which, mainly BRAC group members
received flood rehabilitation inputs. In response to the 1998 flood, many donors funded
NGOs which delivered rehabilitation inputs to their own members. This was a concern
as the extreme poor, who suffer the most damaging losses in any natural disaster, tend to
be under represented in the NGO membership profile. This project was designed to
assist very poor women who were not associated with NGOs and thus were left out of
the 1998 flood rehabilitation programs. The objective of the project was to provide
rehabilitation assistance to poor women through a range of assets with a view to push
them towards self-sustenance and to link them with existing development programs. The
project aimed to involve 3400 hard-core poor women in income-generating activities and
employment enabling them to earn a living and recover damages incurred due to floods. This research was carried out during a time when the project was about a year old. Thus,
impact assessment was not the idea behind this work. It was designed to address two
broad themes: (1) targeting effectiveness and (2) asset specific issues, such as preliminary
ideas of benefits received, challenges faced and future possibilities. For the first theme,
the project used a set of targeting indicators on which information was collected through
survey questionnaire. In addition to this, we asked some basic questions related to
poverty dynamics around two assets-- homestead land and crop land. We developed
separate sections for each asset focussing on benefits, challenges and future possibilities.
We find that this project has been very effective in targeting the extreme poor. This
success is commendable as it involved the development of good indicators, based on a
synthesis of poverty literature and programmatic knowledge gleaned from considerable
BRAC experiences dealing with poverty. One recurrent theme that emerges in this paper
is that the real challenge in providing the critical push in the lives of the extreme poor
involves bringing about critical changes in the agencies of the extreme poor. This has to
be achieved at the individual level and also at deeper and intermediate levels affecting the
reproduction of the poverty trap. Ensuring the economical/technical aspects of asset
returns and its viability are not sufficient in themselves, changes will have to be made in
the settings in which the extreme poor conduct their lives.
|
|---|