Today is PKSF Day. PKSF was established by the government in 1990 with the aim of alleviating poverty through employment generation. PKSF Day 2022 is being celebrated for the first time after 32 years of its establishment, with the slogan 'Towards Development, with Equity’.
Bangladesh has achieved significant progress in income growth, poverty alleviation, and human resource development in the last few decades. According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, the poverty rate came down to 21.8% in 2018 from 59% in 1991. During the same time, the number of extremely poor people fell from 43 percent to 11.9 percent. In this journey of progress, PKSF is working as a complementary force of the government.
At present, about 6 crore men and women, children, adolescent boys and girls, and the elderly belonging to the country's 1.76 crore families are receiving various financial and non-financial support for livelihood, primary health and nutrition, education, housing, climate risk mitigation, and women empowerment.
PKSF was established through Presidential approval on 13 November 1989, and the organisation officially started its journey in 1990. PKSF formulated its first programme in 1990-1991 with the goals of achieving equity, social justice, and poverty alleviation.
Although PKSF initially started its journey as a lending organisation, over the last three decades it has evolved into a family and people-centric sustainable development organisation.
Not only economic development, the main objective of PKSF is to establish human dignity for all, where training, employment, healthcare, education, nutrition, social inclusion, appropriate credit, special programmes for the disadvantaged segments of society are emphasized to improve the quality of life of the poor and ultra-poor people.
In efforts to modernise agriculture and ensure food security, PKSF has established a full-fledged agriculture unit. This unit works with rural communities to enhance production in crops, fisheries, and livestock sector. Besides, as many as 23 lakh micro-entrepreneurs are now receiving various financial and technical support from PKSF.
PKSF’s Environment and Climate Change Unit has been working to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Along with providing safe drinking water through several plants in the coastal areas, PKSF is reaching out to the drought-prone northern regions of Bangladesh with sustainable technologies. Various socio-economic development activities have been undertaken under several projects, including raising the household plinths in char area. With limited resources, PKSF has been gradually expanding its activities to the poverty-stricken and geographically isolated haor area, char, and hard-to-reach hilly areas.
PKSF's future approach lies in the theme -- 'Towards Development, with Equity'. Equity lies in advancing the disadvantaged communities because the regional disparity is a major obstacle to development.
To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, the barriers to sustainable development must be addressed. To remove these obstacles, PKSF has been working for sustainable development of the poor people since long before the official start of SDG implementation.
Alongside the government, international development partners also consider PKSF very important in implementing various development programmes. The World Bank, IFAD, JICA, UK government’s FCDO, European Union, Asian Development Bank, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation are providing loan and grant support through 12 projects. As the first development organisation in the country, PKSF is now the National Implementation Entity (NIE) of Green Climate Fund in Bangladesh. PKSF's ability to implement projects with transparency has led international development agencies to work with PKSF. On the eve of PKSF Day, I sincerely thank all our development partners.
I would like to thank the Financial Institutions Division and the Economic Relations Division of the Ministry of Finance for giving us the opportunity to play a significant role in poverty alleviation. The mass media has been part of our achievements all along. We hope that we will have our journalist friends by our side in the future as well.
Finally, we remember with deep respect the main charioteers of PKSF and Bangladesh's progress -- who are members of PKSF's various development programmes. It is through their labour and sweat that Bangladesh is marching ahead.
Dr Nomita Halder ndc is Managing Director, PKSF.s
