It is a straightforward concept: women equally being involved in decision-making results in more cohesive, peaceful communities. The challenge is that women’s voices - particularly those living in poverty - often go unheard.
To change this, one of BRAC’s initiatives is working with women to organise through community-level forums in villages across Bangladesh, called polli shomaj (community-driven women’s networks).
Polli shomaj members come from all walks of life - teachers, mothers, students, local elites and members of local government. Meetings are informal, with women sipping tea and children playing at their feet, but they are the basis of powerful local action.
Members play active roles to support their communities across a wide range of areas: accessing government services, tackling natural disasters, influencing local government decisions, promoting pro-poor and accountable governance and countering extremism and gender-based violence, such as child marriage. Women gain networks, self-belief and first-hand experience in influencing the trajectory of their community.
Research shows that members of a polli shomaj forum are significantly more likely to be politically active than non-members. They are more likely to campaign for their candidate or run for office themselves. Since 2002, over 9,000 women from polli shomaj have contested in local elections, with almost 3,000 being elected to seats.
We see a similar transformation when women have access to human rights and legal aid support. Our 400 human rights and legal aid clinics take justice to the community level, through a combination of legal assistance, facilitating alternative dispute resolution, providing access to panel lawyers, running human rights and legal education classes and workshops with local community leaders. Together, these components work to build an enabling environment for women to understand their rights and seek justice, through formal and informal channels.
BRAC’s work in supporting women to build platforms for collective action is returning results across all the countries in Asia and Africa where BRAC works. We place women at the heart of all of our work, including as teachers, paralegals and community health workers. In working with women to ensure they can make better lives for themselves, we then see these women improving the lives of their families, the people around them and, eventually, changing the trajectories of their whole communities. Together, they make up millions of stories that prove that - when we invest in women, we invest in a better world.
