#Title

A memoir that helps understand development
BOOK EXCERPT: NONFICTION
In ‘Staying the Course: Journey of a ‘Bengal’ Civilian’ published by The University Press Limited, Dhaka, in 2023, University of Bath Professor Geof Wood reflects on his 49 years of engaging with Bangladeshi NGOs and their work with the rural poor. This excerpt is from the book’s “Foreword” written by Wahiduddin Mahmud, reproduced with permission from the publisher.
The author’s experience with one of the large NGOs, namely Proshika, occupies a large part of the book, which is understandable because of his long experience of working with this particular NGO. However, by narrating this experience, the author provides insights into the development contributions of the entire NGO sector in Bangladesh as well as many tensions within the sector.
WAHIDUDDIN MAHMUD
This autobiographical book is important for recording the experience of a social scientist from the Western academia who researched and spent long periods of his working life mainly in South Asia, and specially in Bangladesh and the Bihar state of India, working closely with development interventions at the field level.
The narratives in the book are fascinating because of the personal touch, the details, and a sense of genuine feelings and empathy towards the subject of the author’s research, namely the poor households in rural Bangladesh (and elsewhere in the developing world). Underlying the apparent narratives of the happenings, there is a less discernible transformation of the mindset regarding the author’s relationship with, and attitudes towards the development practitioners and professional partners in the host country. This mental transformation—as admitted by the author poignantly towards the very end of the book—was one of overcoming a minefield of prejudices, which have to do with the intellectual dissonance and arrogance of a Western academic, mixed with post-colonial sentiments of guilt and hypocrisy. At the end though, the author comes out triumphant in this mental struggle, content and satisfied with his redefined identity—or multiple identities—as aptly suggested by the title of the book.
Perhaps the most important contribution of the book lies in providing intimate insights into how the non-governmental development organisations—commonly known as NGOs—work in Bangladesh. The author’s experience with one of the large NGOs, namely Proshika, occupies a large part of the book, which is understandable because of his long experience of working with this particular NGO. However, by narrating this experience, the author provides insights into the development contributions of the entire NGO sector in Bangladesh as well as many tensions within the sector.
Over the years, the NGOs in Bangladesh have grown significantly in number and coverage, with massive scaling up of their programmes covering virtually the entire range of social development activities—relief and rehabilitation, social protection, poverty alleviation, non-formal education, essential health services, agricultural extension, environmental protection, human rights, education and advocacy, and so on—with the poor rural women constituting the large proportion of their membership.
However, the radical stance of social change adopted by NGOs got blunted when nearly all of them, except a handful including Proshika, began to prioritise service provision over ‘conscientization’ and collective action. This mission drift reflected both the challenges of grassroots mobilisation and donor preferences. The author describes how Proshika went against the prevailing trend and persisted to work through its “primary groups” formed in the 1980s with the intention of creating a political base for the poor to engage on more equal terms with local power holders.
Having had a front-row view of those happenings, the author describes in detail the consequent ups and downs of Proshika and their impact on its leadership structure and sustainability of its microcredit operations. In doing so, the author alludes to important issues regarding the future role of NGOs, their public accountability and sustainability, and the socio-political space for their future operations.
In these narratives, as well as in the numerous academic works of the author on this topic, the emphasis is on the multi-dimensional aspects of human poverty and on exploring the ways poor families experience their marginalisation in different forms. An underlying theme of the book is how the author’s own approach to poverty analysis has been transformed over the span of about four decades and a half since he first arrived in Bangladesh, academically equipped, in his own words, “as a Marxist sociologist with anthropology and development in my repertoire”.
The above shift may have been influenced by his observation of how households in rural Bangladesh deal with poverty, whether coping or escaping. Compared to many other societies, rural Bangladesh is characterised by relatively less pronounced social barriers of class, caste or ethnicity faced by the poor. Compared to other developing countries, the poor in Bangladesh have also been found to be more receptive to new affordable development ideas. This largely explains how Bangladesh could have achieved remarkable progress in some social development indicators like reducing fertility rates through adoption of modern contraceptive methods, reducing child mortality through immunisation and the use of oral saline for diarrhoea treatment, and increasing female school enrolment.
The question remains as to how a corruption-ridden governance structure based on patronage politics as in Bangladesh could perform such a developmental role. The author, along with his co-authors in his academic works, has sought the answer from the point of view of political sociology. Will it be possible for the government to go against the elite interest to raise the revenue-GDP ratio that has remained one of the lowest among the developing countries? Can the current ‘social contract” as espoused by the author, among others, continue to hold?
Besides being an important contribution to autobiographical as well as poverty literature, I hope the book will be of interest to a wide spectrum of readers including development practitioners, academics and public intellectuals.
This excerpt has been edited for brevity.
Wahiduddin Mahmud is an economist and a member of the United Nations Committee for Development Policy. He has retired as Professor of Economics at the University of Dhaka.