Though the New Age Newspaper headline was 'Bangladeshi Aid Worker killed in Afghanistan'. Innalillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun. Abdul Alim (Lebu) hailed from the district of Tangail. I wonder if he will recieve greater posthumous respect than the construction workers who die in malaysia, the restaurant workers who get stabbed in London and the cleaners who dont get paid in west asia.
I wonder who will support his family and dependants now.
The term 'Aid worker' accords an primordial agency that the Bangladeshi 'modern' third sector does not have. It is unnessesary flattery. BRAC would be the middle man, operating under someone elses incentive network and patronage. 'Hired-hand' is another word for it. We rarely 'give' anything (think sink, not source), our ngo sector is varied but on super cynical inspection fall into two categories, the beggars and the plunderers.
There are 2 ways of supporting ones activities in the absence of decent internal fundraising networks and slow grown organisational technique. The first is to play the Development game and suck up to donors and their policy cycles. The second is to look into raising money from operating as a bank to poorer sections of society.
A brutal truth is that in the anarchy, the circumstance has come about where in a given locality it is possible for a poor person to have taken loans from 4 or 5 different micro banks and be caught in a trap. NGO field workers several years down stream scratch their heads with a humility that their institutions should have had well before over stretching operations into an action scenario that they had no hope in hell of comprehending.
Microfinance Institutions try to make money and increase the horse power of individual people. Contrary to the beleif that is widely spread, microfinance institutions do not really work with the ultra poor, who are never a profitable investment. They work with the less poor, who are needy and agree to the terms and conditions of the loans.
Those who suffer from public revulsion with respect to high interest rates, stupid weekly instalments and bailiff practices are not the policy people sitting in the offices of corporate NGOdom, it is the field workers who are stigmatise and in this case tragically victimised.
I dont trust the Afghanistan police to properly investigate this matter, and wonder whether anybody else will bother.
I hope there is some deep reflection going on in BRAC about its limits and validity. BRACs Health and Education work could have been jeapordised by this. When you work with the poor and desperately submissive and beleive that it is you who are saving them, it is very easy to get deluded and enjoy your God complex.
As an organisation they arent exactly accountable to anybody other than themselves. Smaller NGOs and other developing world NGOs thing of them as hegemons, though that could be envy. I know that Bangladeshi organisations with much more funky capabilities restrained themselves from getting involved in pseudo occupied Afghanistan due to their non pragmatic interpretation of Principles.
Interestingly BRAC have opened office in the UK... should be interesting. I wonder if the 'poor' here will answer back?
