Bangladesh - Belgium

the solidarity. The stress on participation is also intended to ensure sustainability of the women’s
organisations by keeping the focus on issues which are relevant to the members.
In Phase 3, Rupantar is emphasising ‘women to women’ coaching and peer learning whereby older
groups nurture new groups.
Lessons Learned
A number of useful lessons have been learned from the Rupantar experience to date, including:
• A long time is needed to affect change- this initiative has been supported for 10 years
• There is a sense that the cumulative effect of combined NGO operation in the area has been
to empower women. This needs to be qualified, however, by an accompanying impression
that NGOs initiatives are overlapping. Hence women on a Rupantar WCC may also be
members of up to 8-10 other committees (approx 4-5 of which are NGO-formed committees)
and may end up talking to UP and Upazila officials multiple times as representatives of
different committees with different sectoral foci. This is a crowded accountability market
place which to some extent is feeding the donor appetite for this type of (gendered) CVA
activity. The risk is that process outcomes/impacts become inefficient or even damaging.
• The development of an appropriate and innovative communication approach through cultural
means is effective and ‘marketable’ to others, and has been picked up by national media
• Projectisation leads to measurement by numbers of meetings and cultural events; e.g.
Rupantar’s project proposal lists regular events and the predicted number of participants
implying that, irrespective of whether there is a meaningful agenda, meetings will take place.
• Over-rigid and/or meaningless indicators in the log frame [e.g (i) at least 50% of women’s
demands met by local government or other service providers (ii) 40% of women inputs
taken up, addressed by the UP (iii) 70% women leaders participating /active in sociocultural-religious
events’] put pressure on the organisation to deliver regardless of external
circumstances and to set up monitoring instruments and indicators which may not be
relevant to the change that target groups are actually experiencing.
• The above discussion suggests that there is a careful balance that needs to be achieved in
this type of intervention between ”top down” mobilisation and “bottom up” social mobilisation.
• The main competence and motivation is the Rupantar model” of social transformation
through drama and song’. Rupantar feels a pressure (although SDC says that it does not
put this pressure on) to (i) scale up (leading to possible inefficiencies when an organisation
has to enlarge) and (ii) bring the voice of poor women into policy dialogue at national level,
which may not be what Rupantar either wants to do or is good at doing.
• There remains a question about the extent to which the women’s organisations themselves
are affecting change in attitude and behaviour of service providers and local administration
and how much of is affected by the presence (and clout) of a foreign aided project. This
question is difficult to really unpack during a relatively short evaluation visit.
III: Models of Change Developed
Rupantar has a clear model of change which builds improved service delivery and outcomes on the
basis of a classic model of enhanced citizen voice and government accountability (see Figure 1).
The gendered nature of this support suggests an “effect assumption” that women’s political
participation is highly effective in engaging government officials and service providers, but it also
suggests a broader set of effect assumptions. These centre on the assumption that political
empowerment of women in their relationship with local government will effect empowerment in other
spheres, notably in their social empowerment in their households and communities, as well as their
economic empowerment in respect of economic decision making and activities.
The discussion above (particularly on impacts and on lessons learned) suggests that these
assumptions have for the most part been well formulated. Perhaps the are of outcomes where they
are least tested is in the impact of this CVA activity on government and service provider performance,
i.e. beyond the encouraging noises and frequent meetings that clearly now take place between
women and these officials. There are indications that, even if they are now more willing and have a
higher level of motivation, local officials may lack the authority and resources to make these types of
observable changes.
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