The Chars Livelihoods Programme is now at the end of its journey. After six years, six cohorts and 78,026 participants, the time has finally come.  CLP2 is complete, we have tidied our desks, turned off the lights and closed the doors.     We leave behind some remarkable achievements: 90% of the extreme poor participants… Continue Reading

With a view of creating a better and pro-poor market infrastructure on the chars, CLP established 70 Char Business Centres (CBCs) across its working areas. CBCs were created to serve as a central body to connect local business groups, input providers and mainland buyers and attract market services that were sorely needed on the riverine… Continue Reading

CLP’s newest brief examines our experience developing community-based organisations, namely ‘Village Development Committees’ (VDCs), who’s purpose was to spearhead social development within their respective communities. From 2010-2016, CLP implemented various interventions to assist poor char-dwellers, some of which aimed to bring about deep-rooted social change and relied on the participation and commitment from the wider… Continue Reading

CLP had supported just over 78,000 extreme-poor households on the chars by the time our operations wrapped up in February 2016. To judge the success of our intervention, CLP developed a set of ten ‘graduation’ criteria by which households were measured against at the end of their 18-months of support. The criteria related to income/… Continue Reading

Over the past year and a half, we’ve been documenting our most important lessons that span over a decade working in the chars of north-west Bangladesh. The aim has been to share our experiences and best practices with the wider development community in the hope of helping shape the future of poverty programmes in Bangladesh… Continue Reading

The unique conditions of the island chars in Bangladesh mean that those who inhabit them, particularly the extreme-poor, are highly vulnerable. The lack of quality health care, education and other government services, not to mention the limited employment opportunities and weak agricultural markets,make it extremely difficult for the poor to break the cycle of poverty…. Continue Reading

CLP is very proud to have facilitated an important partnership between one of our implementing organisations, Manab Mukti Sangsta (MMS), and Standard Chartered Bank. The so-called “Comprehensive Education and Health Program for Sirajganj Char Area People” will bring much-needed health and education resources to the chars. The initiative will benefit extremely poor residents of a… Continue Reading

Despite Bangladesh being well known for its pioneering work in promoting microfinance which gives small loans to the poor, very few microfinance providers operate on the remote chars of north-west Bangladesh. This is mainly due to the higher costs and risks involved for the lenders. Lack of access to microfinance (and to formal financial institutions)… Continue Reading

CLP’s field activities finish at the end of February 2016. With this in mind, the Markets and Livelihoods Unit organised two workshops on the 1st and 2nd February which aimed to improve chances of its Char Business Centres (CBCs) sustaining post-CLP. Following a ‘making markets work for the poor’ approach, seventy CBCs were established by… Continue Reading

The second phase of CLP is drawing to an end. During the last few months we’ve been putting together an attractive, summarised final document which pulls together some of the Programme’s achievements (we at CLP refer to it as an ‘uber glossy’!) We asked Sarah Cooke, DFID’s Country Representative in Bangladesh, to prepare a Foreword…. Continue Reading