Poverty of Island Char Dwellers in Bangladesh. A farm level socio-economic analysis

The major purpose of this study is to determine the extent of poverty and ascertain the causes and possible ways for poverty alleviation as perceived by the rural people. Poverty alleviation was measured by computing the change in food availability, sources of drinking water, physical assets, sanitation and increasing scope of income due to involvement in the Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP). Field work for the study was carried out in Haldia union of Shaghata upazila under Gaibandha district of Bangladesh. Data was collected from January to February 2007 from a randomly selected sample of 102 CLP beneficiaries from a total of 148 through personal contact by using interview schedules, made by the researcher himself, which contained simple and direct questions with different scales. The paired 't' test was used to measure the comparative change of 'before' and 'after' involvement in CLP. Pearson product moment correlation co-efficient was computed in order to explore the relationship between the selected characteristics of the respondents and their poverty alleviation.