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40 Years of ASA: A Glimpse of Hope for the Poor People in Bangladesh.
Historical Background of ASA: ASA was established in March 1978 by Mr. Md Shafiqual Haque Choudhury, through an unusual inaugural ceremony that was held at a rest house of the Roads and Highways Department in Uthuli under the district of Manikganj. ASA originally was used as abbreviation for Association for Social Advancement (ASA) but is now simply known as “ASA".
There are three main evolution stages of ASA. In the first phase (foundation phase:1978-1984), the main activities were to organise the landless people to establish their rights in terms of getting access to the government and institutional resources and protecting the legal rights. During the reformative phase (1985-1991), ASA focused on post-disaster management programme, mini-irrigation programme, and empowering women through providing education, and credit In the last phase (development phase: from 1991 to till now), micro-credit programme was begun in 49 branches in 1991 with the aim to help the poor people for increasing their income to meet relevant expenditure on basic needs and thereby, facilitate poverty reduction (Ahmed, 2002).
ASA's Microfinance Programme: ASA innovated a very simple, cost-effective and sustainable microfinance model. It requires only a few days to approve a loan. There is no exclusive professional accountant or dedicated cashier in the branch. The founder of the institution explained that this innovative idea helped ASA to lower the operation cost and become sustainable. The institution has been experiencing exponential growth since 1991. ASA opened 711 branches over the period from 1990 to 1999. Then, it opened another 2,091 branches over the period from 2000 to 2007. Up to May 2018, ASA had 3,029 branches covering all 64-districts and almost all Upazilas in Bangladesh. Currently, ASA has about 7.6 million active members across the country and employed over 26,000 employees. During the period from 1991 to May 2018, ASA disbursed about 1,899,900 (cumulative) million taka among millions of the poor people in Bangladesh. Currently it has almost 164,760 million taka loan outstanding and over 80,000 million taka savings balance. In view of agrarian economy of Bangladesh, ASA has been specifically focus on promoting the agricultural productivity and creating self-employment through the diversification of agricultural products. ASA offers several flexible loan products, such as dairy farm, mushroom cultivation, vermicomposting, agricultural machineries, and fisheries, in order to encouraging the poor people who are under-employed or unemployed to start-off agribusiness. Over the last 10 years, ASA disbursed 2,550 million Taka among 31,000 micro and small agro-entrepreneurs (ASA MIS, 2018).
In addition, ASA also encourages people who live and work abroad to send money to their relatives through proper banking channel. ASA has been playing a key role in increasing foreign remittance in partnersnip with Western Union and National Bank Ltd. since 2008 and thereby contributing to the economic development in Bangladesh. Up to February 2018,
ASA made 2.3 million transactions and paid out about 61,420 million Taka as remittance (ASA MIS, 2018).
ASA's Social/Non-FInanclal Programmes: Apart from microfinance, ASA has been operating several social programmes such as Education, Health, Water and Sanitation as part of its mission to end poverty and reduce inequality over the last 10 years. The social programmes are being subsidised from its own financial programme surplus. The details of the programmes are discusseabriefly.
Primary Education Strengthening Programme (PESP): There are about 19% students drop-out before completing the cycle of primary schools in Bangladesh (BBS, 2015). Keeping this in mind. ASA has been offering the after-school programme called PESP for the underprivileged students since 2012. The after-school programme provides tuition, 12 hours per week, to students enrolled in government primary schools at pre-school, grade 1 and grade 2 levels. Currently 268,000 students are being served through 10,600 education centres across 61-districts in Bangladesh. A recent in-depth research study found that the programme has a significant positive impact on academic achievement of the students who attended the programme compared to their peers who did not attend the programme (Rahman, 2016).
Primary Health Service and Health Awareness Activities: ASA has been providing primary health services to the poor people in rural areas in Bangladesh since 201L So far. It established 55 health centres in the remote areas including Rangpur, Kurigram, and Lalmonirhat districts. Each centre has one medical assistant and four health assistants. The health centres provide various services including blood pressure and blood sugar measurement, and pregnancy test These centres have served about one million patients in 2017.
ASA believes that it is possible to save thousands of poor people's lives by only making aware of various communicable diseases such as flu, cholera, and tuberculosis. With this in mind, ASA's 15,000 Loan Officers discuss one health-related
issue each month (12 health issues in a year) with members attending during their group meetings. They disseminate various health information and preventive measure to avoid diseases. About 7.6 million active members and their families are being benefited from this health awareness programme. Physiotherapy: Mostly poor people are engaged in manual jobs or physical work for their livelihood. ASA believes that constant physical work can damage their physical ability to work and putting them at risk. Therefore, tney would not be able to work. This would entangle the poor people in the abyss of the vicious cycle of poverty. Some symptoms of the physical damage such as shoulder pain, waist pain, and muscle pain are not being considered as a disease by many people in Bangladesh. Many people believe that these symptoms or problems would be relieved on its own over time. However, there is a lack of qualified physiotherapists across the country. The founder of ASA felt that his organization should do something in order to overcome this and for making the poor people aware. ASA introduced a special health programme on physiotherapy in 2011. In 2017, ASA served 70,000 patients of which most of them were women.
Moreover. ASA established a Medical Assistant Training School (MATS) as well as a 20-bed hospital and both are located in Chunarughat, Habiganj. ASA believes that the health programmes would have a significant impact on achieving Sustainable Development Goaf no 3 relating to good health and well-being by 2030.
Water and Sanitation: ASA has put in tremendous effort to make sure that every household in rural areas has the facility to use improved and hygienic toilets. As part of the sanitation programme, 130 thousands households received 550 million Taka as loan, at a low and affordable interest rate, in 2017. In addition, another 30 thousand households received about 290 million Taka as interest-free loan.
ASA University Bangladesh (ASAUB): ASAUB established in 2006 to provide quality higher education to students from the poor households at affordable cost Currently, it has 3500 registered students who are studying in various undergraduate and post-graduate courses such as BBA MBA, and MPH. The university also offers 15%-100% tuition fee waiver, based on the merit of the students whose parents are poor or involved in any MFIs in Bangladesh. So far, it offered 190 million Taka scholarships for those who were in need and meritorious.
Hope for the Poorest (HP): Hope for the Poorest (HP), a sister concern of ASA established in 2010 with the aim to help ultra-poor people in order to improve their living condition and health status. So far, HP undertook various social programmes such as establishing public toilets, making sanitary napkins for adolescent girls, and implementing WASH (Water and Sanitation) entrepreneurship development project
Major Achievements of ASA: In 2000, ASA became financially self-sufficient and since then it did not receive any fund or
donation from donor agencies. In 2007, ASA was recognised as the top Micro Financial Institution in the world (Forbes, 2007) based on portfolio, cost efficiency, risk and returns. In 2008, ASA was awarded FT Sustainable Banking Award, under the category of ‘Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid' for its cost effective and sustainable model, by the Financial Times (London) and International Finance Corporation (IFC).
All the branches of ASA were computerised in 2007 and now are pursuing for setting a centre to branch online connectivity as well as paperless loan disbursement system by June 2018. All loan officers are having a mobile device for the daily operational activities including collection of instalment and savings. ASA also introduces off-site branch monitoring system. This is a step forward towards achieving digitization of Bangladesh.
ASA has been operating beyond Bangladesh by providing technical assistance on cost-effectiveness and sustainable microfinance model to MFIs in 12 countries in Asia and Africa. These are: India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri-Lanka, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda. Kenya, Sierra Leon, Ghana, and Tanzania,
Conclusion: ASA has explored the potential of millions of poor people by bringing them into the mainstream economy and thereby, contributed to the economic development of Bangladesh. ASA has been working relentlessly in order to help alleviating poverty in Bangladesh as well as achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030. Over the last decade, ASA addressed various social issues such as health and education and put in effort to mitigate the problems of the poor, ultra-poor, and slum dwellers by introducing innovative financial and non-financial programmes. The founder of ASA confirmed that his institution and staff members are committed to do everything needed for help increasing the economic growth as well as bringing down the incidence of poverty to zero by 2030.
Author: Dr. Twyeafur Rahman. Senior Director of ASA (PhD in Economics, University of Strathclyde, UK)