Prabriddhi – Desarrollo Económico Local (LED)

Local Economic Development is the capacity of an urban or rural territory to create a competitive advantage for its enterprises through a broad set of activities and improve the economic well-being of its people and workers.

Bangladesh’s economy has been steadily growing over the last three decades with GDP growth rates above 5% over the last 10 years. Not all regions of Bangladesh however were able to benefit to the same extent from the economic transformation brought by this impressive GDP growth. As decentralization remains an important element of the 7th Five Year Plan (FYP) of the government, new approaches such as Local Economic Development (LED) have entered the sphere of the local government mission. The 7th FYP recognizes that the rural development contributes significantly to the economic development of the whole country and supports Bangladesh’s ambition to reach the status of “middle-income” country. In recent years, established and democratically elected Local Government Institutions (LGIs) at union, upazilla and municipal levels have gained weight in national debates on local governance and decentralization. This will support and renew the decentralization process.

Prabriddhi focuses on building the capacity of an urban or rural territory to create a competitive advantage for its enterprises through a broad set of activities and improve the economic well-being of its people and workers. Prabriddhi is essentially participatory short-term planning, bottom-up designed, owned and delivered, relying on public-private collaboration with an iterative, transparent and open-ended process.

El proyecto

Prabriddhi is funded by SDC and implemented by Swisscontact has started an 18-month long pilot or inception phase in August 2018 in two selected municipalities of Bangladesh, Jashore and Shibganj.

1. Build capacity of municipality level institutions and test the feasibility of the LED process through municipalities;
2. Based on the pilot experiences, design a scale up phase of the project with a national level anchor.

Resultados

Project progress in 2018-2019

• Held inception workshop at Shibganj municipality, where the mayor along with Prabriddhi team members introduced the project and its objectives to key stakeholders
• Held a vision building/planning workshop with Shibganj municipality members to align the goals of the project with their expectations
• Conducted mango value chain analysis with Shibganj’s 3 different mango business associations in order to find out about the existing constraints of the sector and how to address them