The Grameen Bank approach in reducing poverty

Abstract

WHO ARE THE POOR? How should one define the poor in a poverty focused development programme? Unless this question is answered with precision, one may drift into the conventional concern of increasing the productivity and profitability of the small farmers to help the rural economy, thereby improving the economic condition of the "poor". How this could be accomplished by the planned action, nobody seems to take time to seriously think to explain. It is generally left at that, considering it so self evident that one needs not go into details. In the national and international development jargon "small farmer" has been built up as the typically poor and the neglected. Smallness of the small farmer however, varies in the international scene from country to country. We are so obsessed with the "farmer" image of all rural people that we refuse to admit that there exists a class of people called "poor people" without being "landless farmers" or "landless peasants". Even if we wish to define all the people having cultivable land below one acre as "poor", we should avoid calling them "landless and marginal farmers". The purpose in the context of poverty focused development efforts will be better served if it could avoid identifying the target group with respect to any particular occupation, such as farming, and simply call them "poor people" or "people below the subsistence level" or "landless and near-landless people".