Review of the ongoing project (2005-2009) and appraisal of project entitled promotion and projection of women’s human rights in Bangladesh project (2010-2014) of Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP)

The Project

Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP) is a country-wide voluntary organization committed to promoting gender equality through activities and programmes tailored to empower women. Established in 1970, the goal of BMP is to strengthen women’s position in the Bangladeshi society through the following: violence against women is resisted; political empowerment of women is promoted; women’s human rights movement is accelerated through intensified networking; BMP is established as a lobby and advocacy agent; capacity building of BMP is achieved. The Royal Norwegian Embassy has been supporting BMP since 1990, with a substantial part of its budget, currently 85%.

Interesting Findings

• BMP, characterized by the team as a pioneering institution dedicated to the cause of establishing women human rights in Bangladesh, is said to have achieved remarkable progress in mobilizing forces to launch movements for gender equality, resisting violence against women and promoting political empowerment. The organization undertook a series of measures directed towards establishing women’s human rights. In view of its core capabilities, BMP could make both quantitative and qualitative improvements in various dimensions of women’s empowerment. During 2005-08 actual performance almost in all indicators exceeded the planned activities, and in some cases they also carried on unplanned activities to align with the emerging needs.

• Notwithstanding significant progress made in the area of women empowerment, there remains, however, much to do in establishing women’s human rights and ensuring social, political and economic empowerment of women.

• BMP conducted several training programs on organizational capacity building, professionalism, voluntarism, rapport building, mobilization and ensuring access to justice, healthcare and information. However the observations drawn the Review Team and the inferences of the internal evaluation of BMP reveal that the training program need to be more focused and be carried out by professionally trained trainer.

• BMP could demonstrate effective utilization of both human and financial resources during the period under review, which is indicative of its high potential to move further in materializing the goal of women’s emancipation in Bangladesh.

• BMP should revisit its strategies and options of thematic interventions to address the issue of violence against women in the broader framework of political culture, social, economic, legal and institutional framework of Bangladesh.

• Financial management capacity in maintaining accounts and record-keeping at the branch level is not up to mark. In general, BMP should take active initiatives to build up capacity in the areas of preparing annual and semi-annual reports, appraisal reports, planning and budgeting, use of software for accounting, reporting and data analysis, monitoring, evaluation etc.

• To further institutionalize leadership at the field level, BMP should take strategic initiatives to develop management and related functional skill of the field level leaders/volunteers.

• BMP needs to reassess its lobbying activities at all levels. Based on selected observations it seems that lobbying at present is generally concentrated at the BMP Head Office level.

• Being a lead gender advocacy and right based lobbying institution, BMP needs to develop its research capabilities. BMP should train up the existing staff in research and monitoring. However, the team suggests that some of the research projects should also be out-sourced to relevant academic and research organizations.