Title: Impact of Non-Government Organization on

Bangladesh

Course Title: Introduction to Political Science

Course Code: POL101
Section: 21

Semester: Fall 2018

Submitted By:
Sl. N. Name ID#
1. Md. Fouad Hasan 132 0158 030
2. Mahadi Hasan 171 2006 630
3. Zinia Sharmin 171 2950 630
4. Jannatul Ferdous Tabia 181 3096 630
5. Tasmia Rahman 181 3126 630

Submitted to
Dr. Abul Kalam Azad
Professor, Political Science & Sociology
North South University

1|Page
19th December, 2018
Abul Kalam Azad,
Professor
Political Science & Sociology,
North South University,
Dhaka-1229
Course: POL101 (Sec: 21)

Subject: Submitting Group Assignment on “Impact of INGO on Bangladesh”

Dear Sir,

It gives us immense pleasure to inform you that we have successfully completed our report
which you authorized us to undertake as a part of our POL101 Course. We have tried our level
best to fulfill the requirement of this report by engaging ourselves seriously and giving our best
effort to prepare this report. Working hard for this report makes us able to understand the Impact
of Non-Government Organization on Bangladesh which we think will be very useful in our
professional life and also for the social life.

Under this circumstance, we would be greatly happy if you kindly accept the assignment of our
hard work and appreciate us for the future purposes.

Therefore, we would like to provide you additional information if you have any enquires after
reading the report.

Thanking You,
Md. Fouad Hasan
Mahadi Hasan
Zinia Sharmin
Jannatul Ferdous Tabia
Tasmia Rahman

2|Page
Contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4
NGO in Bangladesh ........................................................................................................................ 5
Some World’s Powerful NGO’s in Bangladesh .......................................................................... 6
Activities of NGO in Bangladesh ................................................................................................... 7
Socio Economic Progress ............................................................................................................ 8
Poverty Alleviation ..................................................................................................................... 9
Environment, Health, Nutrition and Hygiene ........................................................................... 10
Education ................................................................................................................................... 10
Why NGOs are Important for Bangladesh.................................................................................... 11
Criticisms of NGO....................................................................................................................... 14
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 15
References ..................................................................................................................................... 16

3|Page
Introduction
The numbers of NGO’s has risen around 2000 to more than 4000 in last 40 years. NGO’s main
focus is to provide relief and developmental aid to developing countries. That means actually
NGO’s work in poor and developing countries. NGOs have supported for bringing pro-poor
approaches and best practice in education, health, environment and governance and microfinance
into the mainstream of international development. It is known that Bangladesh is a Developing
country and 85% of Bangladeshi population live in rural area. So NGO’s key role in Bangladesh
is very significant. From the very beginning of Bangladesh Independent in 1971, Bangladesh
became a site for NGO to work. And since then for the sustainable improvement of Bangladesh
alongside the government of Bangladesh, NGO’s are working. But in initial stage NGO’s had to
struggle for working in Bangladesh. Now here something more about NGO’s,

NGO: NGO means non-governmental organization. NGO is a very important and high profile
non-state actor in international politics. INGO and NGO have the same goals except INGO is
international in scope.

Some Characteristics of NGO

The characteristics need to have for any organization to be considered a NGO.

1) Non-governmental organization.

2) Non-profit organization.

3) Operate in so called third sector that comprises civil society.

4) NGOs have in at least three countries.

5) Must be of recognized national or international standing.

4|Page
NGO in Bangladesh
NGOs have started working in Bangladesh after the liberation war in 1971. They have arisen in
Bangladesh as the savior of countless number of people without food, cloth, education,
sanitation, family planning and basic health facilities. After that they have been started working
in women affairs, training and skill development and awareness building programs. Bangladesh
is considered one of the top thirteen underprivileged countries. With the huge number of
population and feeble manpower competency, Bangladesh is surviving heavy challenge to meet
up the demand of her ever-increasing population. Although in Bangladesh agriculture sector is
known as the main source of income for depending much on its rural-agro, unfortunately this
sector has absolutely succeed to create rewarding employment opportunity for the landless. By
taking under consideration the whole situation, the NGOs are working on poverty eradication by
directly involving the poverty stricken population. Every NGOs’ have some common aspects
those are like No poverty, Zero Hunger, Good Heath and Well-Bing, Quality Education, Gender
Equality, Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Sustainable Cities and
Communities, Climate Action, Life Below Water, Life on Land and so on.

The people who are basically poor and vulnerable with hardly any possessions they actually
started work for them. Their main duty, are to recognize these people, build awareness among
them, train them and make them development oriented. Based on the assessed necessity and
demand of the grass root level farmers and women these organizations are working. By

5|Page
involving the beneficiaries directly, they are working within the context of overall national
planning for development. Though working with in here was much challenging but NGO’s
overcome it.

Some World’s Powerful NGO’s in Bangladesh

There are more than 40 NGOs are registered in Bangladesh those are: Action Aid-Bangladesh,
Asia Arsenic Network, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Bangladesh Action on Disability and
Development (ADD), Care Bangladesh, Concern Worldwide Bangladesh, Development
Association for Self-reliance, Communication and Health (DASCOH), DHI, FAO, German Red
Cross, Green Hill, GTZ, HEED Bangladesh, Helen Keller International (HKI), IDRF, IFRI,
International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (ICDDRB), International Development
Enterprises (IDE), International Voluntary Services(IVS), Islamic Relief Bangladesh, ITDG,
IUCN, NSDP, Oxfam GB, Pathfinder-International, Plan Bangladesh, Practical Action
Bangladesh, SAP - Bangladesh, Terre Des Hommes - Natherlands, The Asia Foundation, The
Hunger Project, The World Bank, Water Aid Bangladesh, World Health Organization (WHO),
World Vision of Bangladesh.

6|Page
Activities of NGO in Bangladesh
NGOs activities in Bangladesh include, but are not limited to, environmental, social, advocacy
and human rights work, promote social or political change on a broad scale or very locally.

Primary activities of the NGOs are:

 Socio economic progress of rural poor.

 Poverty Alleviation.
 Education
 Health, Nutrition and Hygiene.

Major contributions of NGOs in Bangladesh are:

 Coordinating the poor and deprived ones through formation of co-operatives and thus
facilitate the socio-economic progress.
 Assisting the poor and suffering people as well as exercising self-control through
utilization of own resources.
 Identifying native assets, local leadership and ensuring effective utilization of these for
welfare and development.

7|Page
  Health and Nutrition development.
 Acting as the associate of the government and no as competitor.
 Generating alternatives to overcome special social problems and hurdles besides taking
necessary steps to aware the general population.
 Creating positive attitude of the society, annihilation of superstition and belief against
development and bringing in the deprived ones in the main stream of development.
 Giving priority to women in loan scheme by involving them directly in production
process and thus creating scope of additional income in the family, which gradually leads
to self-sufficiency.
 Continuing the assistance towards poor so that they can create own investment by saving
at a growing rate from upward income.
 Creating awareness and developing leadership for the landless and relatively less
facilitated ones.

Socio Economic Progress

Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) play an important role in the economic

development of developing countries. They provide services to society through welfare works
for community development, assistance in national disasters, sustainable system development,
and popular movements. They take numerable for actions developing our society. With the
record of being the most densely populated country on earth and feeble manpower
competency, Bangladesh is facing massive challenge to meet up the demand of her ever-
increasing population. Although agriculture sector is the main source of income for this rural-
agro based country, unfortunately this sector has completely failed to create rewarding
employment opportunity for the landless. Considering these overall situations, the NGOs are
working on poverty eradication by directly involving the poverty stricken population. Their
target groups are basically the poor and vulnerable ones with hardly any possessions. Their
main tasks are to organize these people, create awareness in them and make them
development oriented. These organizations are working based on the assessed need and
demand of the grass root level farmers and women. By involving the beneficiaries directly,
they are working within the context of overall national planning for development.

8|Page
The NGOs are attracting increased attention and recognition among academics and
practitioners of development and development assistance. Many researchers support NGOs’
activities because of their proximity to remote communities and to the poor their efficiency
and low cost of operations e.g., micro-credit programs, their promotion of sustainable system
development and their potential role for organizing and representative bodies in civil
societies. The rapid growth of NGOs is also seen as a consequence of governments’ failure to
alleviate poverty, growing levels of bureaucracy and corruption and a lack of accountability
of government.

Poverty Alleviation
Not only is the alleviation of rural poverty but also NGO plays numerable activities to
develop territory wise the ultimate social development it’s often referred as the unavailability
of resources for meeting the basic living standard. We know that the rural poverty can be
measured on the basis of rural households’ dependency on resources like land or labour,
market accessibility and the protection by society. The existence of poverty across the world
has been evidenced at least for centuries and the underpinning of poverty situation at the rural
level has been remaining as the key feature from the later part of the nineteenth century.

From the individual viewpoint, poverty is often considered as attached with the income
capacity of the population. However the trends and features of poverty are not the same in all
over the world and in all geographical locations. For example, the poverty in Africa is often
considered as the outcome of drought or famine, where in Asia mainly due to political or
bureaucratic corruption and in Europe or America due to the economic slowdown or losses of
jobs. Major poverty alleviation initiatives started to direct towards the well-being of the poor
people through the involvement of the government.

9|Page
Environment, Health, Nutrition and Hygiene
NGOs are taking program on social forestry, water and sanitation to tackle this downside.
NGOs have created an important contribution in extending health services to the poor through
clinics. In Bangladesh, Health and nutrition standing of the agricultural people is extremely
poor. Majority is underprivileged from even least health and nutrition facilities. For this
reason, a big a part of the active NGOs of Bangladesh are providing coaching and education
service within the field of health and nutrition. . They additionally work for dominant through
education, motivation and contraceptive delivery. NGOs are enjoying notable role in dynamic
poorness state by transfer in primary and different health and nutrition care services among
the reach of poor folks.

Education
The NGOs are extremely active within the sector of education. The most effective way to
develop human resource is through applicable education. Illiterates created due to lack of
education is one major obstacle for socio economic development therefore additionally for
poverty destruction. The Bangladesh Government and UNICEF are trying at their utmost level
to eradicate illiteracy.

10 | P a g e
The low rate of admission within the primary schools, failure to draw in the kids to colleges,
unlikable education methodology and course of study for etc. reason the rate of primary
education within the country aren’t in the least hopeful. The NGOs have focused their efforts
on academic illiteracy through useful education. They need been significantly working kids’
education making an attempt to reduce the amount of dropouts. NGOs also offer academic
materials to the poor.

Why NGOs are Important for Bangladesh

Bangladesh is facing to meet up the demand of her ever-increasing population and Bangladesh
government has failed to provide sufficient services. NGO has the same mission as a NGO and
NGOs has become an important development agent in Bangladesh. The growth of such NGOs
over past four decades is Bangladesh has given an increasingly important role. The sector is
rapidly becoming important because of claims that they are effective and efficient. NGOs play an
important role in the economic development of developing countries and also in Bangladesh.
They are working for the poor people of Bangladesh in time of regular needs and arrange
training programs for the skill development of rural people. NGOs give importance on the cause
of poverty instead of changing their attributed of poverty. They are highly active in the sector of
education and they also provide education materials among poor people. They also work for
health and nutrition status of the rural people of Bangladesh. That’s why NGOs are important for
Bangladesh. There are also some other activities which can be discussed as follow

I. Documentation and Networking:

All NGO has a documentation team that keeps the organization updated with human rights
abuses published in the major national dailies. The work of the documentation unit is to gather
and document relevant information for investigation purposes from both the daily papers and

11 | P a g e
personal and organizational sources/contacts, including human rights defenders. These are
included in annual human rights reports and monthly reports of human rights violations, which
are distributed to the media for publication and to other NGOs.

II. Fact Finding:

NGO’s fact-finding activities cover instances of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment
or punishment and abuse of some specific laws leading to human rights violations, repression
against innocent people and application of unnecessary force by law enforcement agencies. They
identifies incidents of human rights violations, which are reported in the newspapers but need
further enquiry and information to clearly establish the actual abuse faced by the victims, causes
behind the abuse and the persons responsible. While the media focuses on human rights
violations more from a journalistic perspective confined within reporting the incident only, the
fact-finding goes deep into the incidents from socio-legal perspective.

III. Research:

The Research Unit at NGO is responsible for the archival preservation and enhancement of the
fact finding reports. This involves the inclusion of legal rights, available data and statistics from
previous years and recommendations into the main text of the fact finding reports as well as
translation and editing work. The work also involves the preparation of human rights reports,
collection of data regarding various human rights abuses throughout the year and writing and
publication of various articles on human rights abuses for public knowledge. Another activity of
the Research Unit is to keep international and regional human rights organizations.

12 | P a g e
IV. Election Monitoring and Observation:

Encourage the electorate to vote freely and without fear to popularize the concept that the
country needs the vote of every citizen. It also aims at campaigning and monitoring for free and
fair conduct of the electoral process to ensure voters' rights. NGOs maintain a close liaison with
the Bangladesh Election Commission. Many NGO has been monitoring national and local
government elections in Bangladesh since 1996. The monitoring work is not only limited to
Election Day, but also covers pre and post-election periods.

V. Media Campaign:
All NGO regularly conducts media campaigns for the protection and promotion of human rights.
The data collected by the organization are published is both Bangla and English language dailies
on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Articles written by both staff and members of the
organization are published in special edition pages and legal rights supplements of national
dailies as well.

VI. Human Rights Defenders Training:

The aim of the training program was to create a grass-roots and local human rights
network. Apart from training on human rights issues, fact-finding and report-writing, Human
rights defenders are also given training on election monitoring prior to every national election.

VII. Advocacy:
Through regular discussion meetings on various issues of human rights and their abuse, NGO
brings together various groups of people, including policy makers, politicians, lawyers, human
rights activists and NGO activists, journalists from popular daily newspapers and victims of
human rights abuse. The findings and recommendations are discussed and the policy-makers are
asked for comments and suggestions.

13 | P a g e
VIII. Urgent Appeals:
To campaign against major violations of human rights and also to put pressure on state actors for
swift remedy for victims NGOs send urgent appeals across the globe through its network and
website. NGOs also respond to urgent appeals sent by other organizations.

IX. Internships / Volunteers:

NGOs provide an internship/volunteer programmer for local and international students,
researchers and activists who are interested in doing filed and desk research work as human
rights defenders in Bangladesh. NGOs provide a safe working environment for the
interns/volunteers.

X. Good Governance:
One of the main focuses of NGOs is promotion of good governance. Without protecting human
rights, ensuring good governance is impossible and vice versa seminars, workshops and
discussion meetings, including round table meetings with dailies, to promote the issue of good
governance.

Criticisms of NGO
NGOs increasingly have become a subject of criticism about their role and functions by the
government, political parties, professionals and public in general. The issues of criticism are as
follows-

 NGOs are taking funds from various donor agencies. That’s why they are more
accountable to the donor agencies than the Government of Bangladesh.
 Political parties, particularly the leftist parties criticize NGOs for taking loan from the
western countries. They argue that NGO increases dependency.
 The most serious allegation against NGOs is that in spite of hundreds of NGOs and
NGOs are working in Bangladesh for many years, yet the reduction of poverty is not
visible. Some of the NGOs that work in Bangladesh, such as USAID, UNISAF, Saved
the children, BRAC.

14 | P a g e
  Some NGOs are related with politics, which is against law.
 NGOs are working with the government without having any coordination among them.
 NGOs are taking fund from donor agencies for poverty alleviation. But they use 50% of
their money for being luxury car 25% money for employee salary 25% money they use
for full fill their mission. It creates duplication of activities and wastages of money.

Conclusion
During the recent years the role and activities of different Non-Governmental Organization i.e.
NGOs are being widely discussed in Bangladesh. The people of different walks of life, the policy
maker, the politicians, the media and even the high level Govt. Officials are taking part in the
debate. The reason is not hidden. The NGOs started their journey in Bangladesh just after the
liberation war. At the beginning the NGOs appeared with some apparently noble programmed
like reconstruction of war-torn Bangladesh. They came forward to help the rural people to
motivate their participation in income generating activities by lending money on easy terms and
also by offering consultancy services. Gradually they took programmed like population control,
alleviation of poverty, eradication of illiteracy, sanitation, adult education and environment
improvement and so on. But very soon the people, the press and the administration began to
suspect the role and activities of the NGOs. NGOs are often found reluctant to produce evidence
of the source and the amount of fund received and disbursed. Sometimes it appears as if they
have formed an administration of their own parallel to the Government ignoring the legal
framework existing in the country. It has also been observed that after all these years the fate of
the rural poor people remained the same though millions of dollars have been spent in the name
poverty alleviation. On the other hand the men in the NGOs are becoming richer and richer day
by day. Most serious of all, very recently some NGOs have been found to participate in the
national politics though they are not supposed to do so. In such a condition a study of role of
NGOs necessitated.

15 | P a g e
References
BANGLADESH. (n.d.). Retrieved December 02, 2018, from The Hunger Project:
https://www.thp.org/our-work/where-we-work/bangladesh/
Bayes, A. (2008, May 06). NGOs in Bangladesh: Myth, rhetoric, and reality. Retrieved December 02,
2018, from The Daily Star: https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-35146
Chowdhury, I. S. (2014, December 1). NGOs come under more close scrutiny. Retrieved November 22,
2018, from The Daily Observer: http://www.observerbd.com/2014/12/01/58157.php
Islam, M. Z. (2016, October 16). Foreign funding for NGOs shrinks. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from
The Daily Star: https://www.thedailystar.net/business/foreign-funding-ngos-shrinks-1299316
ORGANIZATIONS. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2018, from NGO FORUM:
http://www.ngof.org/nrc/wdb/intagency.php
Pritu, J. A. (2018, March 5). NGOs: Teachers from ethnic communities would ensure education among
ethnic children. Retrieved November 22, 2018, from Dhaka Tribune:
https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/education/2018/03/05/ngos-teachers-ethnic-
communities-ensure-education-among-ethnic-children
Sauer, J. (n.d.). 3 Ways Development NGOs Can Increase Their Impact in 2016. Retrieved December 12,
2018, from WASH funders: http://washfunders.org/3-ways-development-ngos-can-increase-their-
impact-in-2016/
Shaon, A. I. (2017, October 26). There must be voices of reason in every society. Retrieved November 22,
2018, from Dhaka Tribune: https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2017/10/26/must-voices-
reason-every-society
WHO WE ARE. (n.d.). Retrieved December 02, 2018, from Care Bangladesh:
http://www.carebangladesh.org/about_care.php
Zamir, M. (2007, October 10). NGOs in Bangladesh and their accountability. Retrieved December 10,
2018, from The Daily Star: https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-7284

16 | P a g e