Empowering the Powerless through Community Organizing Program (EPCOP)

This report evaluates the Empowering the Powerless through Community Organizing Program (EPCOP) in Bangladesh.  The project was started on 1998 and aims to empower the target people socially and economically through organising them into groups and raising their social awareness and household income and employment through training and loan support.

The report examines how far the aim of the project has been achieved, what impacts it has produced so far, how far the project activities were relevant and effective to address the priority needs and problems of the target group and what the present status of the project is.

It found that the project was highly relevant to the prevailing socio-economic needs of the target group and was able to produce some impacts as a project does when performs mediocre. But the project could produce more impacts if it reached its optimum level of effectiveness. The main shortcomings or weaknesses are highlighted:

• improper balance between social and financial intervention; where social intervention appeared insufficient to give a required impetus to the desired social changes

• the project has been suffered greatly due to weak organizational capacity of the local YMCAs in project management, especially in regard to microfinance part of the project. Planning, monitoring, supervision, financial management and control, bookkeeping and accounting, etc. are very weak

• lack of professionalism in local YMCAs and portrayal of a too soft and flexible image in the community has impacted negatively on the microfinance component. Because of this, group members never felt pressure to repay YMCAs’ loans on time

• performance of local YMCAs in microfinance is quite unsatisfactory. Near 50 per cent of the groups are virtually inactive or near inactive, 60-70 per cent of group member are not paying savings or very irregular in savings deposit, savings withdrawal rate is almost double the current savings deposit rate, more than 30 per cent of the outstanding loan is overdue, loan repayment rate is somewhere in between 60-75 per cent.

• revisit the tripartite partnership strategy to make it more functional and effective so that the implementing organisations remain more accountable to NCYB at the same time to SF for their individual performance
• bring necessary changes in the organisational policy procedures, management structure and personnel of the implementing organisations to remove their soft and flexible image
• undertake intensive capacity building initiative to improve the management capacity of local YMCAs
• make a rationale balance between education and financial component that would contribute collectively to the yield of desired impacts
• focus more on group disciplines and norms and savings accumulation through group motivation. For this purpose, senior staff of the implementing organisations should pay more field visits to the groups
• savings withdrawal and overdue rate must be checked
• arrange more training and hands-on technical assistance for staff to improve their competency in microfinance
• find a pragmatic solution to keep financing continued to the local YMCAs.