Harewelle News

Mark Johnston (Finance Director) visit to Bangladesh

Mark has recently returned from another two week input on the £65M shiree/eep project in Bangladesh.  During his visit he met with all 6 of the Scale Fund NGO’s in Dhaka to review and collect feedback on the financial aspects of their operations now that the majority have been running for 9 to 10 months. 

He had a field visit to Sunamganj where he met with two of the Innovation Fund NGO’s, namely Inter Cooperation (IC) and Centre for Natural Resource Studies (CNRS).  When he was with CNRS, a visit was made to some household beneficiaries in the hoar region of Sunamganj to see the households working on their newly acquired land (a 99 year lease from the Government of Bangladesh) with the power tillers which they share between 100 households.  Each household will grow a variety of four crops on their half an acre of land during the 5-6 months they have available, before the land floods for the remaining 5-6 months of the year.

During the second week a workshop was held at the shiree/eep offices with all 12 Innovation Fund NGO’s accountants along with their respective programme managers.  Again, this was to highlight some of the issues found by the shiree/eep accounts staff with the NGO’s monthly returns and to hold a question and answer session on contractual and financial issues.  Mark worked closely alongside Anwar Chowdhury, the Chief Financial Officer for shiree during his visit and spent time with the accounts staff refining the internal accounts systems and working with one of our consortium partners PMTC (Bangladesh) Limited.