PRABRIDDHI – Local Economic Development

The project

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, upzilla 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.

PRABRIDDHI is funded by SDC and implemented by Swisscontact. It has started a 24-month long pilot or inception phase (originally 18 month long but later extended by 6 months) in August 2018 in two selected municipalities of Bangladesh, Jashore and Shibganj. The objective of the pilot phase was:

1. To build capacity of municipality level institutions and test the feasibility of the LED process through municipalities;
2. To design a scale up phase of the project in additional municipalities based on the pilot experiences with a national level anchor.