The Comparison between Microcredit Finance and Community Development Finance to Alleviate the Extreme Poverty in Bangladesh: A Case Study of Shibalaya

Abstract

This paper explains the comparison between Microcredit Finance and Community Development Finance to alleviate the extreme poverty in Bangladesh. According to the theory, Microcredit is a small loan (microloan) to be provided to those who have less collateral, it supports entrepreneurship and alleviates poverty through empowering women and uplifting entire communities by extension. On the other hand, Community Development Finance (CDF) focuses on personal lending and business development efforts in local communities by individual person or institution. The study obtained the opinions of 50 families from Shibalaya Thana under Manikgonj district in Bangladesh through a survey on the impact of Microcredit Finance and Community Development Finance to alleviate their extreme poverty. To conduct this study, qualitative (expert interview, focus group discussion) and quantitative methods was used. The study is based on primary data collection through questionnaires and Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to analyze the data. The study found that both of these mechanisms have a significant role to alleviate the poverty who could utilize the loan properly. However, these two mechanisms for alleviating poverty have some demerits as well. Finally, this study came up with some recommendation to get more benefit from these two mechanisms to alleviate poverty in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, the results of the study are constrained by the size of the sample, area and robustness of the analysis.