Poverty alleviation and service delivery: government and non-government organizations in rural Bangladesh

This paper develops and validates a two-dimensional multi-item scale that captures features related to "credibility" and "focus towards beneficiaries" of government organizations (GO) and non-government organizations (NGO) in the service delivery process of poverty alleviation programmes in rural Bangladesh. The methodology is based on 562 samples collected by the authors from 78 randomly chosen villages in Bangladesh during September-December 2009. Various demographic variables were used to validate the scale by incorporating a new set of data consisting of 368 respondents from an additional 29 randomly selected villages. Significant differences were found to exist between the opinions of beneficiaries of the programmes of both GOs and NGOs after evaluating scale items through discriminant analysis. The study suggests that GO agencies need to concentrate more on items belonging to the "Beneficiary Focus Dimension", and that NGOs need to devote more attention to the items grouped under the "Credibility Dimension". Regional analysis suggests that GO agencies are more efficient than NGOs in delivering services to the rural poor.