Lesson from Comilla, Bangladesh

In November,1982, I came to Bohol because UNICEF had approved a project concept we submitted to establish a training center modelled after the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD) in Comilla. 

BARD used to be known as the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development founded in 1959  by Dr. Hameed Acktar Khan, a noted civil servant who resigned from the service to found a training center in Comilla dedicated to the uplift of the poor, namely, farmers and pedicab drivers. 

When Bangladesh emerged as a new nation in 1971, the center was named after it. 

My visit to the place to take a rural development course under UNICEF sponsorship came about almost ten years after the center got its new name. The name was new, Dr. Khan chose to go to the other half of the country which became Pakistan, but BARD remained faithful to its original mission to try new community development approaches which emphasized organizing the poor and letting them pay for the skills training that they would receive from the center. 

I remember a story told about Dr. Khan in our class. He resigned from a promising career in public service to be among the poor in Comilla preaching self reliance as a philosophy and a way of life to liberate them from the constraints of underdevelopment. 

He talked tirelessly among the pedicab drivers until they agreed to form a cooperative. At each meeting, he would make each participant shell out 1 taka (like 1 centavo) and the contributions grew meeting after meeting until the cooperative had a sizable fund to spend. 

He did the same with farmers who contributed 1 taka each per meeting until they had a fund to run their cooperatives. 

Then Dr. Khan did something unthinkable during those times: he invited the government extension workers based in the capital, Dacca, to travel all the way to Comilla and the poor people’s cooperatives would pay for their travel, accommodation, food and daily allowance. 

The more the extension workers came , the more the training courses grew in attendance. And the more takas were collected to augment the fund of each cooperative.

The idea for a training center grew out of this experience with courses handled by government workers and funded by people’s cooperatives. In 1982, when I took the rural development course, the lesson that training participant would learn from BARD was: “Nothing is given free here; pay for everything.”

I think that was the secret why BARD has survived from 1959 to this day. It celebrated its 50^th year in 2009 at which time it had trained more than a million people not only from Bangladesh but from other countries. 

Unfortunately, however, the Ilaw International Center (IIC) built with UNICEF assistance in Bool, Bohol in 1982 as a clone, as it were, of BARD, survived only for 10 years, from 1982 to 1992.

It probably forgot the lesson learned from Comilla, Bangladesh.