SHOUHARDO III, implemented by CARE Bangladesh, intends to transform the lives of women and men from 675,000 Poor and Extreme Poor (PEP) households in eight of the poorest and most marginalized districts in Bangladesh. Funded by USAID, the program intervenes in the areas of food security, agriculture, livelihoods, health, water and sanitation, resilience, and women’s empowerment. Supported by a robust Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system, the Beneficiary Based Sample Survey (BBSS) 20181 of CARE SHOUHARDO III was conducted with the PEP households of the Char and Haor regions where the program operates. The BBSS has proved to be a reliable tool to gain insights of the progress and status of the major indicators, which are essential for the overall management of the program.

Given the relative mix of programming activities and the indicators selected to monitor program progress, there were four major sampling frames: i) value chain beneficiaries, ii) other farmers (involved with on- farm IGAs), iii) Comprehensive Homestead Development (CHD), and iv) mothers of under-five (U5) years of age children. These were taken to capture the necessary information to track all annual monitoring indicators for indicators 1-13, and indicators 14-27 were collected from the entire Core Occupational Group (COG) beneficiaries. A total of 1,425 samples were taken this year.