Abstract
This chapter discusses NGOs’ capacity for community empowerment with the evidence of two NGOs in Bangladesh, which were discussed in Chap. 6. The concept of ‘empowerment’ is one of growing interest in development discourse. It is a process through which individuals struggle to reduce personal powerlessness and dependency and increase control over the circumstances in which they live their lives. It is advocated by prominent agents in economic and social development and especially by NGOs. As a broad concept, it represents more than a simple increase in income level or access to material resources. Empowerment enables people to organise and influence change based on their access to knowledge, to political processes and to financial, social and natural resources. This chapter considers the nine domains of community empowerment suggested by Laverack (2006). These are improving participation, developing local leadership, increasing problem assessment capacities, critical awareness of people’s needs, building of organisational structures, improving resource mobilisation, strengthening links to other organisations and people, creating equitable relationships with outside agents and increasing control over management. The evidence investigated NGOs’ capacities for these components in the context of competing IK and GK approaches. The evidence found a number of areas of NGOs’ capacities for community empowerment and gathered opinions through different sources, including field data.
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Notes
- 1.
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was the leading Marxist theorist produced by Western Europe since Marx and Engels themselves. By 1917, Gramsci was an influential member of the Italian Socialist Party, and in 1921 he became a leader of the new Italian Communist Party (Morgan 1987, 301).
- 2.
This is something that can be used for support or help and is a human-centred concept. Resources refer to things, such as money, property, assets, wealth, capital or goods, which have economic and social value. In order for something to be considered a resource therefore, it must be perceived to have some attributed value.
- 3.
Monga is seasonal food insecurity in ecologically vulnerable and economically weak parts of northwestern Bangladesh, primarily caused by an employment and income deficit before aman (one kind of paddy) is harvested. It mainly affects those rural poor, who have an undiversified income that is directly or indirectly based on agriculture (Zug 2006, 2).
- 4.
PCR is a mutually obligatory arrangement between an individual who has authority, social status, wealth or some other personal resource (the patron) and another person who benefits from his or her support or influence (the client) (Anthromorphemics, n.d.).
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Islam, M.R. (2016). NGOs and Community Empowerment in Bangladesh. In: NGOs, Social Capital and Community Empowerment in Bangladesh. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1747-6_7
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