Management of the poverty alleviation process has created a new form of poverty enterprise. This enterprise provides poverty‐production‐market linkages, and in the process, it combines three features: a nonprofit nongovernmental organization, a for‐profit nongovernmental organization that has established an internal market, and a profit‐making industrial and business concern. This article explains how BRAC (Building Resources Across Community) in Bangladesh has used poverty to transform itself from a tiny relief distribution organization into the world's largest poverty enterprise. This enterprise is characterized by contradictions between its public claims and actual practices.
Development research in Bangladesh creates friction in projects among various stakeholders-donors, NGOs, managers, researchers or the poor beneficiaries. Research is an element of power relations among the contending actors. The mutually reinforcing relations of power between different actors determine the quality and outcomes of research. All the contending actors' aims may be to serve the poor by promoting development in order to alleviate poverty, but cooperation between them becomes a source of antagonism that can seriously hamper the promotion of local knowledge issues, which become lost in the ensuing differences of opinion and aims.
Pedagogy teaches teachers how to teach, so that they may effectively teach students how to learn; it offers important training for teachers to transform students from mere parrots of information into challengers of and innovators of knowledge. Yet, while Bangladesh has had a long history of university teaching, pedagogy has hardly entered the imagination of university educators. At the university level, pedagogical training would address cultural hindrances to students' advanced learning.Today's teachers are yesterday's students, with each generation being groomed in the same cultural patterns of learning that are continually repeated without examination. At the same time, the majority of faculties lack pedagogical methods for adjusting their teaching framework to accommodate the diversity of students' worldviews to nurture knowledge progression in classroom settings. Importantly, students acquire cultural practices of rote learning and memorization by way of lectures and homework that parrots texts and lectures. Many faculties are unaware that the purpose of a university is to stimulate new ideas and knowledge, provoke assumptions, and teach and encourage critical thinking. The pedagogical challenge also derives from Bengali culture, from which teachers assume a hierarchical mindset and attitude that is counter-productive to students' learning.
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