Creating a Self-reliant Future

Latest News: Update to the Global Board, Animator Reunion, Girl Child Day, Anti-Poverty Day, New Video

• Strategy: THP-Bangladesh works to mobilize grassroots action for a self-reliant future, as a volunteer movement in all 64 districts of the country. Since 2001, this work is focused on strengthening local democracy.

• Union Parishads (UP's) - with populations of ~20,000 people - are the unit of government closest to the people. The Hunger Project is mobilizing and empowering the people of 500 UPs to demonstrate an effective strategy for the sustainable end of hunger.

• Women are the key: Bangladesh suffers the highest rate of malnutrition in the world in large measure because of the low social status of women in Bangladeshi society. Beginning at a meeting with Joan Holmes in November 1999, The Hunger Project in Bangladesh has made the empowerment of grassroots women leaders its highest priority.

• Prevailing Mindset: THP-Bangladesh strongly confronts the mindset of dependency and resignation as a primary obstacle to mobilizing for self-reliance, and as a legacy of the failure of the "service delivery" paradigm of development in Bangladesh.

• VCA Workshop: The three-hour Vision, Commitment and Action workshop is the starting point of mobilization. At this workshop, people create a vision of a self-reliant Bangladesh, discover that this vision is do-able, and that their personal responsibility will make the difference. More than 2 million Bangladeshis have taken the VCA workshop across all 64 districts of Bangladesh.

• Animator Training: A four-day training designed originally to train volunteers to lead the VCA workshop, but now focuses on training volunteers to mobilize and organize grassroots action based on the principles of THP. To date, about 100,000 animators have been trained. The first all-women animator training led by our newly-trained women trainers was held on January 18-21, 2001.

Click here for a full chronology of reports.