The New Nation - Internet Edition

UNB, Dhaka

The United Kingdom will provide Bangladesh with an additional grant of 70 million pounds, equivalent to Tk 900 crore, for implementing an extended phase of the Chars Livelihood Programme (CLP) in aid to poor people living in riverside areas.

CLP is designed to protect the livelihoods of thousands of poor families living in the remote and isolated Jamuna river islands (char) in northwest Bangladesh.

The assistance was announced by British International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander at the Labour Party conference in the UK recently, an official announcement said here Sunday.

In his announcement, Douglas Alexander mentioned that rising food prices, although affected everyone, were particularly bad for those whose lives were dependent on the shifting sands of Bangladesh's rivers and coasts.

"The additional funding will give the poorest people in these areas a chance to grow vegetables, raise cattle and work for food during the hunger season and, in the longer term, insure themselves against the effects of the annual floods," it said.

Bangladesh welcomes this announcement of assistance by the United Kingdom. Over a million of the poorest people in Bangladesh will benefit from this additional 70m pounds given for extending the current CLP until 2015.

The current phase, which is funded by the UK under the Rural Development and Cooperatives Division (RD) of the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives (LGRD), is expected to end by late 2009 or early 2010.

This programme transfers productive livelihood assets to extremely poor people, provides them employment during the monga season and raises plinths to protect them from rising river levels during floods.

The new recipe will provide the Char-dwellers with the chance to help themselves by investing in cattle, goats and seeds as long-term dependable sources of food.

The second phase will be built on the success of the programme's first phase which has increased household income for a half of million Char people and helped even more to grow and buy food, particularly during the Monga or seasonal hunger.

"It will also help fight the impact of climate change in a part of the world, particularly very vulnerable to flooding," says the release.

The schemes will help raise homesteads, vegetable gardens and cow shelters onto plinths above flood levels to ensure people can eat when the waters rise.

Over half of the new CLP funding will go direct to ultra-poor households, many of them women, to help them buy cows, other animals and seeds for food crops. A further amount will go into social protection cash stipends for the very poorest to ensure that they can survive in the period before their plants and animals produce food.

The rest will go into (1) veterinary support and food for the animals (ii) community groups that bring poor women villagers together to share ideas, resources and knowledge (iii) a scheme that provides cash for earth-lifting employment to raise the homes and possessions of people on the chars.