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% to 11.9%. In this journey of progress, PKSF is working as a complementary force of the government. At present, about 60 million men and women, children, adolescent boys and girls, and the elderly belonging to the country's 17.6 million 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 November 13, 1989, and the organization officially started its journey in 1990. PKSF formulated its first program in 1990-1991 with the goals of achieving equity, social justice, and poverty alleviation.
Although PKSF initially started its journey as a lending organization, over the last three decades it has evolved into a family and people-centric sustainable development organization. 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 programs for the disadvantaged segments of society are emphasized to improve the quality of life of the poor and ultra-poor people.
In efforts to modernize 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 2.3 million 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 devealopment partners also consider PKSF very important in implementing various development programmes. The World Bank, IFAD, JICA, UK.
Dr Nomita Halder, ndc, is the 11th managing director of PKSF