Chapter 6: Reducing Poverty Through Strategy and Innovation in a Bangladesh Community Development Project

Over a 30-year period, Bangladesh Extension Education Services (BEES) diffused worked to reduce poverty in six innovative ways:

• (1)

  Introducing new, high-yielding crops, nutritious vegetables, and the seeds and fertilizers needed to grow them.

• (2)

  Developing a new management by objectives (MBO) process that allowed BEES to support improved farm productivity growth with an understanding of the implications of differing family sizes.

• (3)

  Combining introduction of hand powered irrigation pumps with agricultural credit to assist very small farms.

• (4)

  Undertaking early experiments in microcredit.

• (5)

  Delivering health and nutrition programs for mothers of young children.

• (6)

  Dispersing BEES’ knowledge and expertise across a wide geographic area.

These innovations were driven by strategic decisions made in response to changes outside the organization. The result is a resilient organization that can survive without assistance from international funding sources This chapter explores how BEES started as a faith-based program sponsored by donors from churches in the United States and Canada and operated by expatriates, developed a series of innovative approaches to reducing poverty, adjusted to the loss of external donor support, re-established itself after that loss, and grew to become the tenth largest domestic nongovernmental organization (NGO) program in Bangladesh.