Opportunities for the Rural Landless to Diversify Livelihoods through Partnership with a Sponsor: Learning from a Bangladeshi NGO's Income-Generating Programmes

Abstract

As Hulme and Shepherd (2003) pointed out, a “context-specific strategy” and effective “forms of intervention” are indispensable to open up economic opportunities for chronically poor people. Setting foot on such an unexplored territory of poverty studies, this paper focuses on the landless in rural Bangladesh, the poorest category of the society, as a specific context and explores opportunities for them to diversify their livelihoods from dependence on day labour to a higher level for accumulation and reinvestment. Conventionally, employment and income generation for the rural poor has been implemented under two strategies: rural industrialisation and self-employment promotion. Rural industrialisation, based on the transfer from full-time to part-time farmers, has not included any prescription for landless labourers. A vast majority of self-employment projects, usually administered through provision of credit and training, has generated “livelihood enterprises” only for temporal survival, which rarely develop into micro-enterprises set on the path to long-term growth.

As an alternative approach to income generation, this paper highlights the emergence of single economic units formed by combining the economic activities of the landless with support from a sponsor. The sponsor is expected to function as a master trader to sub-contracted landless partners, and also as an intermediary or catalyst between the landless producers and other stakeholders in the rural economy such as private enterprises and landowners.

This paper attempts to embody this conceptual approach drawing upon field observation of two income-generating programmes, poultry rearing and pond fishery, implemented by a Bangladeshi NGO, Institute of Integrated Rural Development (IIRD). First, the proposed approach does not bring about an alternative to the current main income source, day labour, but an additional regular income source which builds a basis of household economy. Second, sub-contracting with the sponsor enables the landless to enter into previously inaccessible markets. Third, the intervention of the sponsor as an insider has successfully adopted cooperative functions, such as cooperative inputs purchase and cooperative shipment, excluding failures experienced by many outsider-led cooperatives. This alternative approach suggests that a paradigm shift is underway from helping poor people's enterprises survive to helping poor people improve their livelihoods as much as possible during their involvement in such a specially arranged opportunity.