Bangladesh - Belgium

Citizens’ Voice and Accountability Evaluation – Bangladesh Country Case Study
vacancies, booklets/leaflets/posters explaining laws and entitlements as well as daily
newspapers.
The adoption of rights based approaches among many NGOs in Bangladesh means
that huge numbers of NGOs are active in awareness raising around rights. Whilst
the awareness raising activities of Rupantar and Samata are in no way unique, both
have successful models to achieve this. Despite all this activity in the area of rights
and entitlements, there is no comprehensive document which provides a compilation
of entitlements for the poor and much duplication of effort here. This points to a need
for donors to invest in one off commissions which can be of use to all those agencies
involved in awareness raising.
The recent impact assessment (2007) of the social movement Samata suggests that
it has had remarkable success. While many other NGOs were entrapped in the
provision of micro-credit, Samata managed to maintain the ideology of a people’s
movement (and therefore no service provision) with a dynamic that requires little
external support. In fact there is growing criticism that this intrinsic dynamic may have
been damaged by the infusion of very large sums of donor money, notably by DFID.
That said, it is important to note that the reported rapid increase in land redistribution
happened after DFID started supporting the project. Rupantar seeks to achieve
somewhat similar ends to Samata but has a higher staff to beneficiary ratio and,
although not specifically investigated in this study, appears to be less efficient in
achieving the scale of change attributed to Samata primarily because it is driven from
outside rather than internally, even though issues confronted are local ones.
Changes in government institutions have been most evident at the level of local
government, with donor-supported NGO activity redressing power imbalances by
increasing the level of participation of marginalized social groups, including women
and occupational “castes”, in government administrative and justice institutions.
Box 4.9.
Reaching Out of School Children (ROSC): Empowerment through
participation
The SDC/World Bank-funded ROSC project is specifically targeted to out-of-school children
and their parents. It thus tends to target the poor who have found supporting their children in
continuous primary education particularly hard. It is their voices which are supposed to be
most influential in designing locally appropriate solutions for the education of their children.
The ROSC project establishes local management and oversight of the schools through
Community Management Committees (CMCs), comprised of 5 parents, a female ward
member, an Upazila education officer (Ministry EDU), an educationist expert, a headmaster of
a nearby government primary school and a teacher who acts as secretary.
Amongst other impacts, this institutional innovation has had an empowering effect on the
women involved. The parents had grown more confident and used a variety of social and
administrative skills through their activities at the CMC. The CMC activities were a positive
learning experience for parents, who could better express themselves, communicate and hold
meetings, use bank accounts and save money.
Source: Authors’ analysis
Institutions beyond the state have also been influenced by CVA interventions. These
include informal social institutions in communities and households, with a particular
focus on gender empowerment. 23 The involvement of poor women in marginalized
23 There are several programmes in Bangladesh specifically targeted to assist ethnic
minorities to raise their voice but restrictions on the number of case studies to be include in
this study prevented an example from being included.
29