NGOs and Empowerment: The Socio-political Contexts of NGOs' Grassroots Empowerment in Bangladesh

Abstract

The objective of this research was to analyze and find out the effectiveness of NGOs' participatory approaches and strategies in mobilizing and empowering rural poor women in Bangladesh. In particular it examined the two largest NGOs in Bangladesh, namely BRAC and PROSHIKA. The evidence in this research indicates that, contrary to expectations, the strategy of group formation and group-based mobilization is not turning the grass roots groups into powerful institutions for social and political change, and is not empowering the rural women as expected. The central argument in this research is that the process of BRAC and PROSHIKA's samiti (group) formation suffers from internal contradictions, and therefore it does not appear to be effective in developing collective identity and collective empowerment of the poor women. The internal contradictions mainly concern organizational of the samitis. The NGOs expect the samitis to set out with the objectives of social and political change, but the samitis limit their objectives to the immediate opportunity to access credit from NGOs. The central argument is supported by two sub-arguments: first, due to different samiti objectives, internal samiti management becomes weak; and second, for the same reason the samitis do not take collective actions against social and political injustices. The findings from three aspects of the grass roots samitis, namely, samiti formation process (chapter four), internal samiti management (chapter five) and performance of the samitis in selected social and political actions (chapter five) substantiate the central argument in this research.