Breaking The Silence - All Projects

Project Name : Strengthening Partnership Agreement (SPA)

Doner : Save the Children

Sector : Child Poverty

Area : Satkhira Sadar

Time Line : January, 2018 to December, 2022

Brief of activities :

Breaking the Silence (BTS) is a Child Rights based organization and the organization was built up by a group of activities. BGD Danida Strategic Partnership Agreement Project is working in Satkhira Sadar Upazila under Satkhira district. This project focused deprived adolescent and youth in targeted rural areas of Bangladesh have improved their economic, social and political status with active support from strengthened CSOs. Because of adolescents and youths are agents of change in their own lives but are not organized in a common platform to raise their voice and communicate their needs. In reality, 30% of the population is not considered in the development agenda in Bangladesh. They are excluded due to social and cultural barriers. There is also lack of opportunities to build capabilities of deprived adolescent and youth that makes them vulnerable in terms of decision making about their own lives at family, workplaces and the societies, leading to early marriage, violence, exploitation, abuse, child labour, exclusion, gender discrimination,  The active involvement of deprived adolescents and youth will increase their ownership of the program activities and will increase their motivation to acquire the skills needed for social and political empowerment.

Project Name : Institutionalization of Horizontal Learning Program in Bangladesh (HLP)

Doner : National Local Government Institute (NILG)

Sector : Local Government Devision

Area : Satkhira district's All Upazila & 78 Union Porishad

Time Line : February, 2019 to December, 2022

Brief of activities :

Children are particularly vulnerable during their journeys and when they reach their destinations because often they move to a place where they do not know anyone to whom they can turn for help and where they might even be seen as not worth helping. Both in transit and at destination, they are often unconnected to the communities through which they pass or settle, either permanently or temporarily. Their lack of documentation, language barriers or the stigmatization against them often means that they deliberately avoid contact with others and have difficulty in accessing basic services. Their isolation makes them particularly vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and violence.

Supporting children in transit is challenging, however anecdotal evidence suggests this is not impossible given that there are well-known transit hubs in Bangladesh that demarcate the rural-to-urban trajectory. Tracking children can push them into looking for more invisible and potentially dangerous routes to evade detection, especially if they suspect that the aim is to control or interrupt their journeys. Because these children are difficult to reach, they are often underserved.

For obvious reasons, information on the number of children who move is very scarce, and their reasons for moving and the challenges they encounter during transit and upon arrival are widely variable. Such difficulties are further compounded by the complexity of developing programmes that protect children while they move, since most protective services are fixed in one location. Because migration routes are not linear, it is difficult to devise responses that can provide for children at each stage of their journeys, especially when protection systems are either absent or undeveloped, or when they struggle to reach the community level.

Analysis of children’s movement has been limited in two main ways. On the one hand, children’s movement has been considered largely within the limits of the debate on child trafficking. On the other hand, in the broader debate on migration, children’s movement has been researched mainly as part of their parents’ movement. Both frameworks are inadequate. As a result, the framework for children on the move opens more space for interventions that genuinely respond to their needs and that are respectful of children’s rights, including children’s right to express their views, and to access services and other support to promote their best interests.

Project Name : Core Support Model (CSM)

Doner : Save the Children

Sector : Child Rights Governance

Area : Satkhira Sadar

Time Line : January,2022 to December, 2026

Brief of activities :

The local governance framework is very important because this level of government is most closely in contact with children. Strengthening this framework has the potential to benefit all children in Bangladesh but will particularly benefit the most disadvantaged through better planning and increased investment targeting the most disadvantaged groups. While a number of organizations have provided support to strengthen the capacity of local government, no agencies have systematically addressed the relationship between local government and children.

The CFLG Project aims to create systematic sustainable changes in the processes of local government decision making for better realization of the rights of children. To emphasis the process, the project has implemented different activities and events for incorporation of CFLG indicators in the LGI’s performance indicators, circulation by Local administration and UZP of an official order to UPs requiring them to make a special allocation of budget for children, ensure children participation in the planning and budgeting processes and setup complaints and response mechanism at the school, UP, Municipality and UZP level. However , the project designed to achieve the following specific objectives between January to December 2018:
CFLG is a strategic framework placing children at the center of the agenda of local bodies, government line agencies, and civil society. It is built on a two-fold approach that simultaneously increases the capacity of local government, and empowers children, youth and their networks to engage with the authorities.