Exploring the long-term impact of development interventions within life-history narratives in rural Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper explores long-term effects of microfinance, educational transfers and agricultural interventions within life-trajectories in rural Bangladesh. More than one-half of respondents had used microfinance for some kind of income-generating activity in their lives. For 18 per cent it was an important cause of well-being improvement, but about one-third had used microcredit to cope in crises. Educational transfers contributed positively for 29 per cent of participants, but its impact was limited by low monetary value of benefits. The life-histories showed little long-term benefit from the agricultural technology programmes, and a number of possible reasons are discussed in the paper.

Keywords:

• poverty
• development interventions
• microfinance
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Department for International Development through the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom. It builds on collaborative work funded by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, HarvestPlus, and the World Bank. The author acknowledges helpful discussions with and comments from Bob Baulch and Agnes Quisumbing. The author thanks Zahidul Hassan and Md Zobair of DATA, Ltd, for managing the fieldwork team so efficiently. The author also thanks Biswas Akhter, Rafiqul Haque (Shawpon), Dilara Hasin, Safia Satter (Sonia), Md Abdul Aziz, and Anowara Begum (Nupur) for their excellent research assistance.

Notes

1. The development interventions were of three types: microfinance, educational transfers, and new agricultural technologies, with the latter consisting of a mix of improved vegetable and fish polyculture projects.

2. DATA Ltd is a research consultancy firm based in Dhaka with well-established expertise in conducting large-scale social surveys and other research activities.

3. The dataset from this study is available publicly from http://www.ifpri.org/dataset/chronic-poverty-and-long-term-impact-study-bangladesh

4. ‘Sites’ refer to districts in all cases except in Mymensingh and Kishoreganj Districts, where the ‘site’ and the two selected villages spanned the district boundary.

5. These categories are chronically not-poor, chronically poor, move up and move down with respect to the per-capita expenditure national poverty line at the time of the baseline and 2006–2007 surveys.

6. When I was with the team, I participated in interviews with either men or women.

7. As the principal analyst, I found it useful to visit and discuss the life-histories with participants in every household in the life-history study.

8. I draw here from Henry Brady's four theories of causality: neo-Humean regularity theory, manipulation theory, counterfactual theory, and mechanisms and capacities (Brady 2002). For further reading on causation in the social sciences, see Holland (1986), Marini and Singer (1988), Ringer (1989), Sobel (1995), McKim and Turner (1997), Wendt (1998), Pearl (2000), Waldner (2002), Thompson (2003), Winship and Sobel (2004), and Gerring (2005).

9. The term process tracing is used by political scientists (see, for example, George and Bennett 2005) to describe this kind of activity in political analysis; it refers to peering ‘into the box of causation’ (Gerring 2008, p. 161). Process and mechanisms are seen as the means by which a cause (X ₁) is seen to produce the effect (Y).

10. These are the Female School Stipend Project, the Female Secondary School Assistance Project, the Secondary School Development Project, and the Female Secondary School Education Stipend Project, which all target secondary school-aged girls in rural areas.