MFI Report

BACKGROUND:

Grameen Manobic Unnayan Sangstha (GRAMAUS) is a non profit voluntary organization established in 1984 by the initiative of young people, social workers, and NGO personnel who had an initiative, a kind of social work that will not only help people the rural poor, but also make them capable of undertaking the responsibility of their development. GRAMAUS was established with the purpose of alleviating poverty and making marginalized groups, especially landless and small farming families, self-reliant through Group formation, Training, Income Generating Activities, Non-formal education, utilization of local resources, Women's development and undertaking need-based and problem solving programs by importing skills, knowledge and techniques. It believes in bottom up, non-directed, integrated and participatory development framework and acts as a catalyst with its target people.

The organization has endeavored to be an effective instrument of development of the poor since its establishment. It has been consistently making efforts to evolve an alternative development strategy. Over the years, the organization has succeeded in developing strategies, approaches and programs relevant to its alternative development paradigm, referred to as participatory sustainable development paradigm. It has pioneered the concepts and method of organization building participatory approach and planning process, access to common property resources, like Social forestry, Education program and many innovative employment and Income Generating Activities through credit management.

Over the years the objectives and goals of the organization have expanded. The organization seeks to promote the health and socio-economic condition of women by undertaking different development programs. The organization dreams and strives for a society which will be free from exploitation and oppression, and where every individual will be able to live in peace and get an equitable share of the available resources. It has experienced and skilled staff who are quite capable of carrying out all kinds of development activities.

The achievements are remarkable and praiseworthy in the operational areas, and the organization has built a good relationship with local administrations and government departments, and activities of the organization are highly appreciated and accepted by the local people.

OBJECTIVES:

-To help poor rural people in building the organizational structure necessary for undertaking collective and united efforts to eradicate poverty and economic backwardness.
-To enable landless and marginal farming families to increase their income and improve their nutritional status through Homestead gardening, Poultry, Fish culture, small enterprise agro - processing and other IGAs.
-To enable small farmers intensify and diversify crop production and pursue other rural enterprises.
-To foster savings attitude to develop their capital for income generation and meeting their emergency needs.
-To help the poverty stricken people so that they can realize and analyze their situation, can identify their problems & causes there of & can take appropriate action collectively to solve those problems.
-To help the target people so they can plan, manage & evaluate their organizational patterns.
-To provide credit support for developing own capital for running income generation activities and encourage them to generate more savings fund.
-To support and impart methodological training to target groups in order to enable them to effectively carry out the plans and programs of the organization.
-To provide adult and child literacy education to the beneficiaries.
-To provide health, sanitation and environmental education to the beneficiaries.
-To encourage the beneficiaries to tap local resources with a view to become self-reliant.
-To encourage the beneficiaries to build up their village, Union, and Thana level institutions through which they can run their activities independently.

MAIN CHALLENGES:

-Political instability
-Overlapping of NGO activities
-Migration
-Natural disasters
-Fundamentalism/ Militant
-Widely used HYV seeds and pesticides
-Crises of available funding Hide