Once a group is formed, its members elect a leader and a treasurer who deposits

Once a group is formed, its members elect a leader and a treasurer who deposits their savings in a joint account. Individual members may only be able to save about two taka (one cent) a week, yet the members of Banchte Shekha have saved a total of more than thirty million taka in this way. Members can take loans from the group savings for emergency, personal, or business reasons. The group approves the loans, which are given at no interest and with no set payback schedule. Nevertheless the default rate is only one percent.

The groups meet weekly to talk, work together, participate in training sessions, and make decisions about what they will do with savings or any money generated by their agricultural, craft, and small trade projects. The income from these projects is not large, but in a country where the per capita income is $220 a year, it is significant. A 1988 study by sociologist Monawar Sultana found that members were earning up to 700 taka (approx. $15) a month, and that, in some families, these earnings represented fifty percent of the total family income. Where the women are the sole wage earners, these earnings may be all the family has to survive on.

Banchte Shekha offers members a practical, basic education that focuses first on empowerment and income-generating skills, then on legal literacy, health issues, and family planning. In Gomes' pragmatic idealism, a woman who can create her own job and feed herself and her family is an educated woman. She is disdainful of people who emerge from higher education with no job and no idea of how to take care of themselves. She also has no use for education programs aimed at the poor that do not provide the knowledge and skills that they need to survive.

Dissatisfied with the teaching materials that were available for adults, Gomes has created her own: songs, plays, posters, and books that convey Banchte Shekha's message. Reading and writing are important, says Gomes, but not as important as eating. Not as important as staying alive and understanding that you are not powerless.


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The road to the village of Chadpur is a rutted dirt track that divides row upon row of bright green rice paddies. It ends in a grove of banana trees about fifty yards from the scattering of bamboo and thatch houses.
The most prominent building in the village is a sturdy bamboo pavillion. It was built by Chadpur's Banchte Shekha group and sits on land that the women purchased with pooled savings from their cottage industries.

About forty Banchte Shekha members are gathered in the pavillion to welcome Angela Gomes and some visitors from the United States. Their talk is lively as they settle on the floor with their embroidery.

The arrival of the strangers attracts a curious crowd of villagers: women with bright saris pulled protectively around their heads; a few men in lungis who stand on the edge of the crowd; and the usual army of brown-eyed children who gather close around, gaping and laughing.