Holistic Approach for Rural Vulnerable Entrepreneurs through Sequential Training (HARVEST)

Generally, poor people are not financially assisted by banks and other financial institutions due an inability to meet collateral requirements and no verifiable repayment history. Also, bureaucratic and lengthy credit process makes formal financial systems difficult to access for poor and underprivileged people. In this prevalent situation, microcredit has become increasingly a common tool for serving the underprivileged people. Despite its widespread acceptance and popularity, microcredit is not always utilized the way it should be. Lack of entrepreneurial skill & experience, expertise in business management and poor decision-making ability inhibits the poor borrowers from reaping the fruits of microcredit. Although there are a good number of NGOs in Bangladesh providing loans to impoverished people, only a handful of them provide training and guidelines on proper investment and money management. It is a common practice in some rural areas that borrowers are often connected to two or more microfinance institutes. Therefore, without adequate business knowledge and experience, these borrowers are sometimes overburdened with liabilities.

The intended goal of the CSS Micro Finance Program (MFP) is to develop women entrepreneurship and thus help them come out of poverty. In this regard, the HARVEST project serves as a training program for the clients of MFP with an aim to demonstrate the benefits of microfinance at the grassroots. With the help of a “Train-The-Trainer” methodology, the HARVEST project appoints professional training experts to train CSS MFP zonal and regional managers. Later these senior managers pass on the knowledge in a cascade mode to the branch managers who later train the loan officers. These trained officers ultimately provide training to the MFP clients in two separate groups; group leaders and micro entrepreneurs.