The days of hardship, which Shirin Akter went through in the past few years, now seemed to be a long nightmare. She was absolutely clueless about what she should do as her husband’s income was not enough for bearing all expenses of her family.
But a state-supported project lit a light showing her the way of survival with her daughters and sons. When she was in frantic move in search of a good job for decent living, the Amar Bari Amar Khamar (ABAK) project was launched in her village Rampur of Muradnagar upazila in Cumilla district. It was 2011.
From that year, Shrin Akter did not get any time to look back at the days of hardship and frustration.
Instead, she started dreaming of good life that eventually became a reality. The housewife is now a successful entrepreneur, thanks to the ABAK project. Shrin Akter became a member of Rampur Gram Unnayan Samity of the project and borrowed Taka 10,000 from the samity to start poultry farming. After one year, she repaid the Taka 10,000 and took another loan of Taka 20,000. She has now around 220 chickens and she gets almost 100 eggs every day. She makes profits of Taka 300 to 350 daily.
Like Shrin Akter, thousands of poor people have been able to change their fortune with the help of this project.
‘The government has already established 1,17,204 Gram Unnayan Samities across the country for providing all poor people a decent life,’ said director of the scheme Akbar Hossain.
He informed that the beneficiaries of the project have deposited over Taka 1,867.67 crore till May, 2020 and the government has provided Taka 1,619.94 crore to the project.
The project director said the poor people are included in the Gram Unnayan Samity after their proper identification. Each of the samities consists of 60 members – 40 females and 20 males. The members of the samity deposit Taka 200 a month each for building their own fund, while the government provides equal incentive as bonus against the savings of the members. ‘We are now supporting around 2.56 crore people of 51.27 lakh families through the samities,’ he said, adding that the main philosophy of the project is to remove the shortage of capital by creating a permanent fund for the poor and generate employment through small savings instead of microcredit.
Through the project, he said, the government is assisting capital formation of the poor farm families, sharpening their skills through training and motivation, allowing them to sit together at courtyard meetings, enabling them to take decisions independently, enabling them to develop need based small family farms and ensuring marketing facilities for their products.
The project started in 2009 with Taka 1,492 crore and finally the project was revised in 2016 with Taka 8,010.27 crore.
