The academy, which is located on the outskirts of Comilla town, was founded by Akhter Hameed Khan, the cooperative pioneer who was responsible for developing and launching the programme.
[2] While the results of the model ultimately frustrated Khan's ambitions, it has important implications for rural community development, particularly cooperative microfinance and microcredit.
[3] The Comilla Model was Khan's reply to the failure of Village Agricultural and Industrial Development (V-AID) programme, launched in 1953 with technical assistance from the US government.
To simultaneously address problems caused by the inadequacy of both local infrastructure and local institutions, the Model integrated four distinct components in every thana (sub-district) where it was implemented: Considerable emphasis was placed on distribution of agricultural inputs and extension services, for example by helping farmers to grow potatoes in the sandy Comilla soil, and using cold storage technology.
The dynamic personality of Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan helped to mobilize and harmonize diverse groups to work towards a common goal for rural development.
In the early years of BRAC (NGO) and Grameen Bank in the 1970s, both Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Fazle Hasan Abed tested cooperative approaches to delivering credit to poor people.
Dowla & Barua recently summarised the thinking at Grameen Bank: A major reason for the prior failure of credit cooperatives in Bangladesh was that the groups were too big and consisted of people with varied economic backgrounds.
In 2013, learning from key reasons for failure of previous village cooperative approaches in South Asia, particularly around elite capture and corruption, Islamic Relief Bangladesh (IRB) adapted BRAC's ultra poor poverty graduation model by introducing Self-Help Groups (SHGs) as a mechanism to galvanise self-help as well as self-managed interest-free saving and credit amongst targeted households.
SHGs within each upazilla form into registered cooperatives, acting as platform for building linkages with wider service providers and support to members.
SHGs and cooperatives established since 2013 under this approach continue to serve members helping them to multiply and diversify livelihood options whilst avoiding interest payments, lifting thousands of families in northern and southern Bangladesh out of extreme poverty.
This neglect is clearly visible in the Khan's initial design of the Model, since the cooperatives were conceived of as an instrument for maintaining public infrastructure, and were dependent on the delivery of government extension services and credit for their success.
Cooperatives however, have fallen prey to elite capture in many oral communities, and in less densely populated nations than Bangladesh, it still proves challenging to deliver microfinance to them.