Bangladesh
WOMEN IN FACTORIES ADVANCED TRAINING SOUTH ASIA ENDLINE REPORT
Women in Factories (WIF) is an initiative of the Walmart Foundation’s Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Program:
• The Advanced Training curriculum was developed by CARE International.
• The AT course requires 99 hours of training.
• There are 5 main training units.
• Topics include health and nutrition; functional literacy and personal finance; communication; gender, social status and relationships; and leadership.
• The WIF Advanced Training was introduced in India and Bangladesh in 2012.
• The Walmart Foundation’s delivery partners are CARE in Bangladesh and Swasti in India. Read More...
• The Advanced Training curriculum was developed by CARE International.
• The AT course requires 99 hours of training.
• There are 5 main training units.
• Topics include health and nutrition; functional literacy and personal finance; communication; gender, social status and relationships; and leadership.
• The WIF Advanced Training was introduced in India and Bangladesh in 2012.
• The Walmart Foundation’s delivery partners are CARE in Bangladesh and Swasti in India. Read More...
WOMEN IN FACTORIES FOUNDATIONAL TRAINING SOUTH ASIA ENDLINE REPORT
Women in Factories (WIF) is an initiative of the Walmart Foundation’s Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Program:
The Foundational Training curriculum was developed by CARE International.
The FT course requires 9 hours of training.
There are 7 modules covering communication, managing work and career, gender awareness, personal hygiene, and reproductive health.
The WIF Foundational Training was introduced in India and Bangladesh in 2012.
The Walmart Foundation’s delivery partners are CARE in Bangladesh and Swasti in India.
Read More...
The Foundational Training curriculum was developed by CARE International.
The FT course requires 9 hours of training.
There are 7 modules covering communication, managing work and career, gender awareness, personal hygiene, and reproductive health.
The WIF Foundational Training was introduced in India and Bangladesh in 2012.
The Walmart Foundation’s delivery partners are CARE in Bangladesh and Swasti in India.
Read More...
VSLA By the Numbers: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Impact and ROI of VSLAs
Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) have been a foundational programmatic approach at CARE since 1991. Since then, CARE has helped over 13.7 million people join savings groups. The savings group model has been adopted and adapted by a variety of organizations globally. Through this report, we will examine the social and financial effects and returns of savings groups as well as how groups affected members’ resilience to COVID-19. The results gave an overview of the financial return on investment (ROI), group economic outcomes, savings groups costs, and individual and household effects for savings groups both inside and outside of CARE.
In order to calculate a return on investment, the financial benefit for a typical participant over three years was considered as well as the financial benefits for a replicated VSLA for two years related to the cost that the donor/implementer spends to set up and oversee the VSLA for its first cycle. Using internal CARE data such as budgets, evaluation, and impact reports, the average ROI of costs to establish a saving group was between 7:1 and 20:1. For every $1 invested by CARE, there is evidence for the savings of a typical VSLA participant to increase between $7 and $20. For the average VSLA participant, median income increased by $9.35 (+/- $0.55 USD) within the first year of joining the group for each $1 USD invested. Additionally, average income increased by $18.85 (+/-$1.15 USD) within five years of each $1 USD invested. Using industry data and internal CARE data, this analysis showed that for every $250 USD invested three net new children attended school.
The financial effect of a VSLA appears to outlast the formal lifecycle of the group. Evaluation of VSLAs as they phased out found that the return on savings (ROS) was 50% (+/-10%) during the supported formal lifecycle of the group and decreased to around 35% (+/-19%) after the VSLA is phased out. However, the positive outcomes and impact of participating in VSLAs continue even after project phase out. Members continue saving and getting benefits. Share value even increase for 57% (+/-13%) of groups in the available data.
Read More...
In order to calculate a return on investment, the financial benefit for a typical participant over three years was considered as well as the financial benefits for a replicated VSLA for two years related to the cost that the donor/implementer spends to set up and oversee the VSLA for its first cycle. Using internal CARE data such as budgets, evaluation, and impact reports, the average ROI of costs to establish a saving group was between 7:1 and 20:1. For every $1 invested by CARE, there is evidence for the savings of a typical VSLA participant to increase between $7 and $20. For the average VSLA participant, median income increased by $9.35 (+/- $0.55 USD) within the first year of joining the group for each $1 USD invested. Additionally, average income increased by $18.85 (+/-$1.15 USD) within five years of each $1 USD invested. Using industry data and internal CARE data, this analysis showed that for every $250 USD invested three net new children attended school.
The financial effect of a VSLA appears to outlast the formal lifecycle of the group. Evaluation of VSLAs as they phased out found that the return on savings (ROS) was 50% (+/-10%) during the supported formal lifecycle of the group and decreased to around 35% (+/-19%) after the VSLA is phased out. However, the positive outcomes and impact of participating in VSLAs continue even after project phase out. Members continue saving and getting benefits. Share value even increase for 57% (+/-13%) of groups in the available data.
Read More...
Women’s Voice and Leadership Program Formative Evaluation
The formative evaluation of the Women’s Voice Leadership (WVL) Program covered the period from its announcement in June 2017 to March 2021. The evaluation had three objectives: to determine if and to what extent Global Affairs Canada was “fit for purpose” to support WVL as a feminist program; to determine if WVL’s design features and implementation modalities were relevant and appropriate to address the needs of women’s rights organizations (WROs), and to determine WVL’s progress toward results. Read More...
The impact of commodity price hikes on poor and extreme poor households – SHOUHARDO III
Between June and July month, the SHOUHARDOIII program conducted its annual Beneficiary Based Survey (BBS) and captured the impact of recent price hikes on the life of the program participants. The SHOUHARDOIII program reaches over 475,228 members of 168,535 poor and extremely poor households in Bangladesh. The findings of the annual survey confirm that households are experiencing an increase in the price of essential commodities over the last six months. Read More...
Harvesting the Outcomes of SHOUHARDO III’s Local Service Provision Model of Micro Seed Dealers and Micro Seed Retailers (MSD/MSR)
SHOUHARDO III aims to ensure sustainable agriculture and livelihood for its beneficiaries. Part of this entailed forming community groups consisting of both men and women farmers, as well as increasing their capability in terms of quality seeds, agricultural technology, input and output markets, and connections with public and private actors. Read More...
SHOUHARDO III – Capturing the changes and impacts of reformed Community Groups
SHOUHARDO III program established the Community-level Thematic Groups in the inception year of the program in 2016 to facilitate the large-scale program interventions on Agriculture and Livelihoods (Farmers’ Field Business School/FFBS), Health and Nutrition (Maternal Child Health and Nutrition/MCHN groups and Mother Groups), Women’s Empowerment (Empowerment Knowledge and Transformative Action/EKATA), and Governance (Village Development Committees) with additional components represented by the youth groups and Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA). These groups were reformed into gender and age-specific Community Groups (CG) following the midterm evaluation in 2018 that provided recommendations on putting in place a sustainability strategy. Read More...
Impact, Influence, and Innovation: Reflecting on 10 Years of the CARE-GSK Frontline Health Worker Initiative
In recognition of their critical role in health linkages and systems strengthening, CARE and GSK established a decade long strategic investment in frontline health workers (FHW) and community health workers (CHW) in 2011 called the Frontline Health Worker Initiative. Following 10 years of partnership and programming, this report explores the resulting impacts, influence, and innovation. It synthesizes reach and impact data from 13 programmes across the 9 countries included in the Frontline Health Worker Initiative between 2011 and 2021. The countries included in this initiative are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, and Togo.
The data presented here is specific to the communities in which CARE delivered sexual and reproductive health, maternal and child health, nutrition, and sanitation programming with GSK’s support. The analysis is designed to identify the changes in overall health outcomes that occurred at a population level. While these findings do not necessarily imply causation, CARE’s efforts have likely reasonably contributed towards these changes within the specific communities.
The Frontline Health Worker initiative has achieved these results across multiple development and humanitarian contexts – including slow-onset and sudden shocks, conflict, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these results were only made possible through the long-term investment from GSK and scalable actions that were implemented across all nine countries. Critically, the Frontline Health Worker Initiative established platforms, networks and health service capacity-building that served as a catalyst for CARE to pivot towards the response to the COVID-19 pandemic quickly in the communities where these projects exist.
Learnings from this programme will serve to strengthen CARE’s private sector partnership models for future programmes to build resilience and achieve health impact in communities. Read More...
The data presented here is specific to the communities in which CARE delivered sexual and reproductive health, maternal and child health, nutrition, and sanitation programming with GSK’s support. The analysis is designed to identify the changes in overall health outcomes that occurred at a population level. While these findings do not necessarily imply causation, CARE’s efforts have likely reasonably contributed towards these changes within the specific communities.
The Frontline Health Worker initiative has achieved these results across multiple development and humanitarian contexts – including slow-onset and sudden shocks, conflict, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these results were only made possible through the long-term investment from GSK and scalable actions that were implemented across all nine countries. Critically, the Frontline Health Worker Initiative established platforms, networks and health service capacity-building that served as a catalyst for CARE to pivot towards the response to the COVID-19 pandemic quickly in the communities where these projects exist.
Learnings from this programme will serve to strengthen CARE’s private sector partnership models for future programmes to build resilience and achieve health impact in communities. Read More...
End line assessment of GSK supported Community Health workers (CHW) initiative in Sunamganj district, Bangladesh
In spite of improvement in maternal and child health, the Sylhet division continues to have the poorest indicators in Bangladesh. Higher mortality for both mother and child and poor utilization of healthcare services still exist in the Sylhet division. Sunamganj is one of the remotest areas in Bangladesh and belongs to the Sylhet division having the poorest maternal and child health status. Since December 2012, CARE Bangladesh together with GSK and other key stakeholders has been implementing a Community Health Workers (CHWs) Initiative, which aims to address the lack of skilled human resources in remote and underserved unions of Sunamganj district. The overall goal of the CHW initiative is to improve maternal and child health outcomes in underserved/remote and poor communities of Bangladesh by increasing their access to quality health care services. Through a unique model of Public-Private Partnership (PPP), the project developed 319 Private CSBAs who are providing maternal and child health services including primary treatment of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) like diabetes and hypertension in the entire Sunamganj district. To do a robust measurement in terms of assessing maternal, neonatal and child health (MNCH) related knowledge and practices as well as documentation of learning of these innovative initiatives, icddr,b conducted a baseline study in 2012 and end-line assessment in 2018. Read More...