The toilets were given to beneficiaries who had also received one of the above inputs. They are physically unfit for the livelihood of the poor in general on the basis of work – agricultural work, rickshaw pulling etc. Definitions of the extreme poor vary as a result of the many constraints faced by the poor and, in particular, the extreme poor.
We explore the effectiveness of project targeting by dividing beneficiary households into two broad categories: female-headed households (FHH) and male-headed households. The project goes quite well in terms of the dual criteria of targeting FHHs and. 44% of MHSH reported at least one case of illness in the last month that led to job loss.
Perspectives from the PWR Exercises
These observations show a limitation of the PWR exercise in that it focuses on the household as a unit, homogeneous unit and does not take into account extreme forms of vulnerabilities that may be faced by some of its members, although the household as a unit may not be much. arm. We would like to introduce another argument here regarding the interpretation of the target performance of the project according to the PWR exercise results. Thus, one way to assess the targeting effectiveness of the JFRP is in relative terms - compared to microfinance project targeting performance towards the poorest.
Among these households, there were six that did not meet any of the target criteria. Therefore, among the households that PWR classified as the poorest and did not meet any of the other target criteria set by the project, were those that were members of MFIs. Of the 10 JFRP recipient households that fell into the poorest PWR category, nine were from this type of household.
However, it should also be noted that among the PWR group of households ranked as 'poorest', there is a significant proportion of households (59%) that do not meet any of the target criteria, except the criterion (of ' no current MFI membership' Understanding the poverty dimensions and dynamics of this group of the poorest households should be an important future research topic. This is clear from the discussion on the previous section on the targeting of the JFRP/ECHO -project that it was extremely successful to have an extremely strong focus on the poorest.
Given the set limit and small coverage of the project relative to the number of very poor households meeting the project targeting criteria in the working area, Type I targeting errors (except those that should be included) are inevitable. This is reflected by the fact that a significant proportion of households (53%) categorized as the 'poorest' in the PWR exercises did not meet any of the JFRP/ECHO project criteria.
Poverty Dynamics: Some Basic Exercises
Homestead Land Dynamics
In the entire sample, 48% of them did not own the homestead where they lived at the time of the survey. Almost 69% of these households never owned property, while the rest lost it over the years. Landlessness is a sign of extreme vulnerability in rural Bangladesh, and the fact that 33% of all households surveyed were found to have never owned a property is a strong indication that the project is indeed working with a range of households trapped in chronic forms of extreme poverty.
The loss of homestead is also another important indicator of extreme downward mobility pressure on the household and 15% of all households surveyed found that they had lost their homestead and did not have any at the time of the survey. This distribution below shows that household shocks, especially those related to medical treatment expenses, constitute the biggest trigger in the loss of homestead land. When surveyed households are categorized by household headship, we see that the share of 'households that used to have homestead land but not now' increases as we move from households with male heads who can work to households with female heads who are widows.
From this figure we also note that the percentage of households that 'never owned land'. The vulnerability of FHH widows is caused by the loss of assets, such as land in the house, caused by the death of the spouse. This is not the case for divorced/abandoned FHHs --- 53% of such households in our sample were married to men who themselves did not own any land.
Own Crop Land Dynamics
Again, when we differentiate households by categories of household management, we find a picture similar to the one we obtained earlier for household dynamics. The project has not only been successful in targeting the extremely poor, as we saw in the previous section, but also the chronically poor among them. This is reflected by the fact that a large number of these households never even owned a farm (48%) or cropland (73%).
We also find that a significant proportion of households have lost their homestead (15%) land or cropland (21%) and had none at the time of the survey. 65% of such households did not own the homestead they lived on at the time of the survey. 53% of these households never owned homestead land, suggesting that a large proportion of these households suffer from intergenerational poverty which affects their quality of marriage.
Our survey data shows that 25% of the JFRP/ECHO project beneficiary households belong to this category. 11 However, we saw earlier that 27% of the households lost their homestead land due to river erosion. It seems that some of that river erosion affected households that moved into untouched land (which is a diverse group of people), the project was successful in selecting the poorest---those who were landless.
Benefits: Inferring from Revealed Preferences
Consumption, medical and clothing expenses are of course important and this turns out to be an important category of benefits reported by the surveyed households. To check the benefits reported by households in the first quarter, in the asset-specific section of the questionnaire, we asked how the income from the use of the asset, such as the sale of eggs, in the case of poultry, the sale of milk, in the case of cows , and the sale of additional goats, were used. We find strong correspondence between the responses obtained from this and that obtained from the first quarter, suggesting that the asset was indeed an important contributing factor in enabling households to undertake the reported investments/.
Dare to Microfinance?
Challenges of Targeting: The Scatter Dimension
We get a sense of the distributed outreach issues from our survey data, which are designed to reflect asset-specific spatial diversity at the union level. Difficulties with distributed care were exacerbated by understaffing and negatively affected the quality of follow-ups and monitoring12. Dispersed reach also poses other challenges: for example, if assets are transferred to only a small number of households and not to others who live nearby and are equally eligible, this could cause hostility and confusion, negatively impacting the project could have.
Initially, only one field worker was assigned to each upazilla, and very soon it became clear that additional staff were needed. Another project organizer was subsequently appointed in June, six months after the project was operational. Innovations at the field level, however, minimized much of the potential damage that the twin problems of sprawl and understaffing could have caused.
Discussions with field staff revealed that such a dispersed outreach and understaffing made individual family visitation and follow-up on a regular basis nearly impossible. Each meeting site holds a weekly session where field staff can discuss important issues and learn about individual problems. This arrangement does not preclude individual family visits, but given the reality of distributed outreach, it allows field staff to plan and ensure these visits are more efficient and effective.
They can now focus more on problem cases, on those who remain absent from repeated meetings and on those for whom it is difficult to commute to meeting places regularly given their physical location.
Asset-Specific Problems and Challenges
- Poultry: Possibilities and Pitfalls
- Cows and Goats
Yields fall towards the end of the cycle, as we saw in the first part of the figure above, while feed costs remain fairly constant. Such a presumption makes the issue of controlling poultry mortality even more important to the success of the project. Let us assume that the selling price of the previous batch is taka 65 per bird.
Then, at the end of the cycle, a minimum of approximately 14 birds from the previous batch must be sold to replace the funds15. Since the feed is free for the first three months in the first round of the project, we exclude these costs when calculating the profit in the first round. The former is extremely important, and our conversations with the field staff of this project clearly show its key role in achieving the project's goals.
We collected data on the number of birds the beneficiary had lost at the end of the first cycle. According to the website of Hendrix Poultry Breeders, the breeders of the Bovans Nera poultry breed, 'the performance of the Bovans Nera in the laying period is based on the quality of management during the growing period'. This resulted in a significant number of poultry deaths early in the cycle.
This is essentially a financial intermediation problem related to the cash flow of the poultry project. In summary, the poultry component of the JFRP/ECHO project is full of opportunities and pitfalls. On the one hand, the importance of a relatively regular flow of income in the lives of the extremely poor cannot be overstated.
Regarding the problems reported by the beneficiaries who got cows and goats, we get the following.
Conclusion
