Rural Enterprise Project As rapid population growth of Bangladesh is narrowing the scope of employment and income earning sectors, and thus new livelihoods are essential for reducing rural poverty. Rapid urbanisation and globalisation has opened new opportunities, but the poor may not be able to gain access to these opportunities. Realising this, BRAC initiated the Rural Enterprise Project (REP) to encourage employment and income generation through entrepreneurship. REP was formed in 1985 to find and test new opportunities for rural development. The primary objective was to experiment with various income generating enterprises that can be owned and managed by rural landless women. REP mostly initiates BRAC’s non-farm activities. Some of BRAC’s most successful enterprises have emerged from testing carried out by this unit. In order to develop entrepreneurs among women, REP has created opportunities for them in non-farm activities such as iodised salt production, hybrid paddy cultivation, hand made paper production, garbage collection for fertilizer production, garment waste processing etc. The major programmes under REP are Non-farm Enterprise Extension and Reinforcement (NEER) Programme and Micro Enterprise Development (MED) Programme. This programme has encouraged VO members to take non-traditional roles in creating and managing small enterprises like restaurants, grocery stores, tailoring, carpentry workshop and laundry. These initiatives were once tested successfully under REP. At present, NEER programme works separately to improve and expand those enterprises. The women-owned restaurants called Shuruchi (good taste) and women run grocery stores called Shuponno (quality goods) are two projects of NEER that deserve special mention. Major activities under NEER include: i) Shuruchi (Small Hotel) ii) Shupannya (Grocery Shop) iii) Shucharu (Laundry) iv) Shubesh (Tailoring) v) Api-Culture vi) Srijoni (Carpentry Shop). Death Benefits BRAC
introduced a death benefit policy for its VO members beginning in June
1990. The key features of BRAC’s insurance policy are: |