Ranjit Ray - life transformed by engineering training
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Authors
Mokhlesur Rahman
Issue Date
2015-10
Type
Language
en
Keywords
Economic Development
Alternative Title
Abstract
Poverty is a multi-faceted problem: In recent development discourse, poverty alleviation programmes acknowledge poverty has multi-dimensional aspects. Impact evidence from around the world demonstrates the same. Thus, development interventions need to understand those aspects when designing solutions. Therefore, it is not surprising, while agriculture inputs support work for someone, light engineering may work better for someone else. And some others may find cattle rearing or small trading are more suitable for their livelihood than any others. Over the last 6 years, the Extreme Poverty Programme of Practical Action, Bangladesh has learned how to design development interventions in this context. The learning has been guiding us to identify and develop appropriate solutions for poverty alleviation in the context of river erosion. Solution never goes through liner line: In my last blog post, I tried to convey how skills training can play an important role in reducing poverty at an individual level and can support reducing disaster risk and vulnerability at the community level. Similarly, in another blog, I stressed how local led technology and agricultural inputs support to river eroded poor people help to drive out of poverty. To add to these, I am going to focus on how light engineering can also help people to challenge poverty and move towards self-reliance. Tale of Ranjit: Ranjit Ray is a youth of 24. He lives with his mother and brother at Hudur Bazar in Rajpur union of Sadar Upazilla of Lalmonirhat district in Bangladesh. The family has been living on the embankment since 1994. In early 2013, Ranjit was selected as beneficiary and give training on light engineering. Subsequently, in May, 2013, he also received training on repairing rickshaw-vans. After his training, he rented a small shop adjacent to his village Hudur bazar at the rate of BDT100/per month. Since, then he has been running it. Now, it is going well and on average, he earns BDT300 (US$ 3.80) per day. With this income, he repaired his house at a cost of BDT 2000 (US$25) and leased 10 decimal of land for BDT 12,000 (US$ 152). He has ensured access to safe drinking water and installed an improved latrine. At present, he also has good clothes to wear and can obtain better food. Social acceptance has been increased within his local community. He dreams of establishing a small business for spare parts. To materialize his dream, he has started saving from his income. Looking back to his past, he finds the training was very effective and changed his life. In his words, “If every young person had vocational skill development training and tried to utilize their own skills, s/he would become self-reliant. I am grateful to OVA and Practical Action, Bangladesh for bringing such change in my life.” Conclusion: Poverty has structural as well as functional concerns. Being a development professional, we cannot bring or expect change in structural spheres overnight. It takes time. However, we certainly can bring some changes in functional areas. Our development interventions provide evidence to claim ‘the vicious circle of poverty’ can be prevented! We should keep trying to do that! Blog post - http://practicalaction.org/blog/programmes/climate_change/multi-faced-poverty-and-contextual-intervention-tale-of-ranjit/