Bangladesh - Belgium

Lessons Learned
Important lessons learned include:
• Social change and social movements are historically situated and explained. This needs to
be taken into consideration when attempting to scale up successful movements.
• Resource distribution can be a highly effective driver of economic, social and political
empowerment.
• Influencing resource distribution to ensure key elements of gender equality (in this case the
50:50 property rights entitlement) can have a transformational impact on gender roles and
relations (see Most Significant Change tables below)
• Pyschological gains such as improved self-esteem, motivation and aspiration can be
achieved through a successful entitlement claim.
• Dramatic gains in social and economic well being and mobility can be achieved within a
generation as evidence by reports of educational attainment of second generation Samata
children.
III: Models of Change Developed
As described above, this project uses social mobilisation for claims against the khas land entitlements
as the starting point for empowerment in social, economic and political spheres (see Figure 1 below).
Recent evaluations and this CVA evaluation suggest that these assumptions are credible and are
sound, with observable and measurable impacts as mapped out in Figure 1. The are only two
significant question marks highlighted in Figure 1. The first is the assumption that because of the
demonstrable progressive impact of a movement that has helped the poorest claim their entitlement
to khas land under a government law, this will somehow enlighten policy makers to bring other
legislation and procedures in line with this model of change. This is certainly not a great claim in the
project or movement, and is more of a tacit assumption. Given the broader political economic and
social context of concentrated power and hierarchy, this assumption must be treated with some
scepticism. The second question mark is over the effect assumption relates to assumed output of the
project a social movement such as Samata can be “modelled”, scaled up and replicated
unproblematically. The historically and geographical specific context of the Samata movement,
combined with the absorptive capacity constraints of the movement, should prompt a serious amount
of reflection on this assumption.
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