YWCA of Bangladesh

Women's Right and Social Security

 

Advocacy

In a developing country like Bangladesh, it has been proven that awareness activity for women's human rights; empowerment and social security played a very crucial role to achieve ultimate women empowerment. By giving the proper importance to this content, YWCA of Bangladesh maintains active alliances with its various stakeholders and performs a broad range of advocacy activities targeted to raise awareness for the women’s human rights, empowerment & social security by influencing local and national policymakers and public opinion. Women empowerment is a very sensitive and important issue where the advocacy

plays an essential role in developing a support base among the people in the different level of the society. And this support base ensures greater public support in every aspect of this issue. YWCA of bangladesh is organizing various programs in community, district and central level at different scales through meeting, collaboration and coordination with relevant stakeholders.

By this all its activity receives the proper visibility and acceptance in the communities and achieves sustainable development and social equity. And the advocacy issues, its challenges and solutions are discussed in seminars, open or group discussions, campaigns, issue based presentations etc and the entire activities are arranged by YWCA. And as various methods are used to create awareness, the message is effectively circulate among the diverse target groups. It has enabled the community people to accept the change in the policies by easy to understand advocacy campaigns and initiating vast awareness activities.

YWCA of Bangladesh is organizing various programs and events for the members of the communities, activists and media groups by exercising effective communication and awareness tools for achieving the below mentioned objectives:

• Identifying and categorizing emerging social issues, scopes and stakeholders in response to the implementation of main programs.

• Building lasting relationships and establishing linkages with the stakeholders and networking organization at community, national and international level

• Developing strategic and practical knowledge for capacity building.

• Enhancing the impact of development activities to the community.

• Building an informed collective voice to re-shape thinking and practice for ensuring women’s rights & social security.

• Making a strong base of public support to work in favor of development activities.

 

YWCA of Bangladesh has developed various advocacy materials by vast research and analysis and distributed those to assist the main programs to be implemented perfectly and without facing much more difficulties and hinderance. With the cooperation of the community people and other key stakeholders, YWCA of Bangladesh is campaigning for legislative and pragmatical change for a rightful society at the local and national level through its well-planned activities of advocacy & networking. Under the umbrella of advocacy related activities, it has been regularly performing the tasks like developing effective and timely advocacy policies and networking guidelines; mobilizing mass media; arranging issue-based promotional activities through meetings, workshops, seminars, campaigns in a participatory manner targeting different stakeholders like, government, civil society, community people, church communities, NGOs, women's organizations, existing partners etc.; also observing nationally and internationally important days in a way so that the community people participate in those occasions actively; organizing interaction meetings and open discussions on priority based issues like women's right, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, women's economic empowerment, child right, health & nutrition and gender equity; lobbying policy makers for the meaningful participation and involvement of women in policy and decision making and so on.

The acceptance of YWCA among the target people, civil society as well as the NGO community has been increased due to the broader involvement of YWCA in the community through its programs especially active involvement in women’s rights issues, civil society as well as among the NGO community. The program has also encouraged YWCA to rediscover women’s latent qualities and take a active role in protecting rights of women and be supportive to others in the same community who is in need.

It has been observed in the internal reports that more than half (58.8%) of the women beneficiaries can take their family’s savings or Investment decisions either by their own or by mutual understanding with their husbands or any other family members. About 70% women can take child bearing decision together with their husband. 65% group members mentioned of having the freedom for decision making about children’s health care and education related issues. About 49.1% were found of having active participation in their family’s major purchase decisions.

Almost 34 percent women actively participate in their family decision making. On the other hand, only 5.3 percent women are forced by their family members to implement the decisions and almost 31 percent respondents have shared responsibilities while implementing any family decision.

However, still in more than 31 percent cases it was reported that husband takes the entire decision on savings and investments decision without consulting their wives. Men still significantly dominates decision related to their wives’ health care as 37.9% reported that their health care decisions are taken by their husbands. On the other hand only 18.2 percents have reported that their husband takes independently their children’s education decisions.

In the case of major expenditure related decision making, most of the decisions are still taken by their husbands alone or with other family members except her. 46.1 percent respondents reported this. On the contrary, 30 percent have reported that they have equal participation when these decisions are made.

Husbands’ attitudes towards their wives play a very crucial role in establishing women rights and women empowerment in the family. Survey indicates that a large number of the respondents (42.7%) get respect and honor as well as importance in all types of works by their husbands. Almost 21 percents have reported that their husbands are very much indifferent towards them or even in some cases they get negligence from their husbands.

Women’s involvement in social activities are treated as an indicator of women empowerment and this survey depicts that about 33 percent of the total female respondents are involved with either different social club or societies or local administration other than YWCA.

A good number of Beneficiaries (14.8%) are participating by only attending in the meeting of those organizations whereas 8.4 percents have active participation in discussion. More than 6 percents have no activity except their name in the organizations and only 2.2 percents are found as leader of those organizations.

Apart from this, more than 37 percent reported that last year at least one social gathering or event has happened in their locality through mass participation in which 16.8 percent have active participation, 8.7 percent have direct support and 10.6 percent have indirect support.

 

Networking

Networking activity is staggeringly helpful to create required awareness, encourage a certain group or specific community, advocate and facilitate the execution of any kind of development programs. Building strong, lasting relationships and co-operation with other networks, social agencies and organizations having similar goals like Government organizations, Non-Government organizations, community based organizations (CBOs), national & international development groups always create a great environment for all by sharing individual experiences, problem solving incidents and resource sharing initiatives to achieve theultimate goal. Networking activity of YWCA of Bangladesh at field, sub-national, national and international level is perpetually discovering opportunity in maintaining invariable relationships with all the mentioned organizations along with the donors. These activities increases the great opportunity of views, knowledge and experience sharing, liaison with each other and alsoco-operation for capacity building.

 

YWCA of Bangladesh is acting a an important mean to connect with undeviating and raw experiences of the grassroots level to make a significant progression for action research so that the prevention and support women’s right and social security is ensured under all the networking activities. In 2010-11, all those awareness and communication activities have successfully brought together a huge number of potential stakeholders to perform actively in order to achieving development goals. YWCA has contributed a successful role to increase the importance of networking in achieving equal and balanced opportunities in social life, education and quality of life development by creating a positive attitude of the community towards a respectable standard of living for all.

 

Promotional Activities

YWCA of Bangladesh has been involved in various effective promotional activities with the firm aim to motivate the target people in different socio-economic levels towards building eagerness for social development, creating positive human attitude and practices towards the women in the family and the society to ensure women's right and social security. Promotional activity is a critical mean to improve the success scenario of development projects and programs by ensuring the impulsive integration of different channels and media to create required knowledge based and informative stance in the field level.

In 2010 – 11, a significant number of activities were arranged as the part of the promotional activities related to the key programs so that the target beneficiaries would be well-informed about the different issues by some attractive and effective activities like rally with miking to create awareness, courtyard meetings with behavior change communications and posters, cultural programs for an attarctive presentation, group meetings, video shows, idea and concept sharing, seminars, house visits, workshops etc. all these activities were related with social mobilization, advocacy and networking. Thus it helped the core programs to easily implemented without much obstacles or difficulties as the required awareness were created before hand. So as pre-assumed the ultimate goal was achieved in a smooth way due to the effective and attractive promotional measures.

All those activities has successfully got the target groups involved in bringing about social pragmatic change especially improving the socio economic condition of disadvantaged women. So that it has been supporting them to defend women's right and social security providing consciousness of social issues as education, literacy, health, nutrition, water & sanitation, protecting environment, tree plantation, women empowerment, attaining life skill development, participating in development activities etc..

Under the umbrella of promotional activities, YWCA of Bangladesh is enabling the community people aware of the development process and inspiring them to enhance the understanding and perceptions to cope with time and need since its inception, by reinforcing the scope of interpersonal communication(IPA . Over the reporting year 2010-11, it utilized the optimum efforts to transfer ideas, messages, skills, information to the target beneficiaries by developing and distributing proper and timely awareness driven materials such as leaflets, flipcharts, poster, booklets, brochures, manuals, flyers, billboards etc. it employed the best efforts to communicate ideas, distribute messages, skills and important information to the target beneficiaries.