RURAL BANGLADESH - PreventionWeb

Socioeconomic Profiles of WFP Operational Areas and Beneficiaries
Participation varies across the regions. Virtually all CHT households (96 percent)
participate in community festivals, whereas participation of Char dwellers in community
festivals is less than two-thirds (65 percent). Disaggregated data indicates that three-quarters
(76 percent) of male-headed households participate in community festivals whereas fewer
than half of female-headed households participate in the festivals, an indicator of social
capital exclusion.
Even access to community assistance favours non-vulnerable households. Despite their
relative wellbeing in the rural communities, more than half of all non-vulnerable households
are able to access different forms of community assistance against only 40 percent of
vulnerable households, indicating the importance of political leverage in accessing
assistance. Finally, participation in various community organizations and committees is
invariably dominated by non-vulnerable households, nearly one-third (29 percent) of whom
participate in school committees, market committees, mosque committees or other similar
village committees, within which invisible poor participation is virtually zero (1.4 percent
participation).
4.2 VULNERABLE GROUP DEVELOPMENT (VGD) PARTICIPATION
The world’s largest development intervention exclusively targeting vulnerable women, VGD
provides 750,000 participating households with a monthly food ration of 30 kg of wheat and
25 kg of wheat flour (atta), combined with a service package consisting of human skills
awareness, income generation training, and a savings and credit component. The goal of the
VGD programme is to graduate women following two years of food assistance into NGO
development programmes to provide women with enhanced sustainable livelihoods
opportunities. WFP implements VGD through partnerships with the Ministry of Women and
Children Affairs (MWCA), Ministry of Relief and Disaster Management (MRDM), NGOs
and Union Parishads in all Upazilas throughout the country. Participating unions are
normally supplied with minimum fifty VGD cards to distribute to households meeting a set
of selection criteria.
In an effort to improve VGD targeting and selection, WFP and MWCA amended the VGD
targeting and selection process with the purpose of reducing inclusion errors 3 by introducing
three exclusion criteria and five inclusion criteria.
Participants must be (exclusion criteria):
♦ Women in the 18-49 age group;
♦ Women not participating in any other food or cash assistance programme;
♦ Households not participating in food-assisted programmes anytime during the
previous three years.
VGD participants should meet at least four and preferably all five of the following inclusion
criteria:
♦ Household members consume two or fewer meals per day.
♦ Households own less than 0.15 acres of land.
♦ Household housing conditions, including sanitation, are very poor.
♦ Household income from daily or casual labour is extremely low.
3 Inclusion of non-deserving participants/beneficiaries in a programme is termed as inclusion error.
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