ANNUAL REPORT 2011 Practical Action, Bangladesh Practical Action, Bangladesh: Working Area Country Office Field office Working Area Bay of Bengal ANNUAL REPORT 2011 Contents From the Country Director's Desk Reducing Vulnerability and Natural Resource Management Markets and Livelihoods Programme Infrastructure Services Programme Organisational Development Unit Organisational Details Financial Statement Practical Action Worldwide Practical Action Offices in Bangladesh Acronyms Acknowledgement 03 05 15 21 27 33 36 37 38 39 40 From the Country Director's Desk y 2012 the current five year strategy of Practical Action will come to a completion. The organisation is now in the process of taking stock of its achievements celebrating success and learning from failures and shortcomings. For Bangladesh there is much to be celebrated, recognised and commended as we review and evaluate its past five year country strategy. The country office has made a tremendous leap in many aspects such as raising the biggest single country project (Shiree) with a budget of 3.7 million pounds, EC project (2.6 million euros), 10 million dollar from SDC for supporting markets access for the poor living in the chars, reaching 170,000 people over the period and contributing towards their food and livelihoods security, scaling up of its activities in terms of target population geographical coverage, and receiving international awards such as APFED Gold award from the Government of Japan for its innovative and useful support TOWARDS poor people’s livelihoods through technology development and dissemination. We are proud to state that a documentary film on sandbar cultivation received Cannes silver award from its corporate and TV documentary category. In addition we have expanded our work and collaboration within the region with reputed organisations in south Asia region such as Development Alternatives and CUTs in India, Tarayana Foundation in Bhutan, and Peeda in Nepal that has made notable contribution in regional collaboration, learning, capacity building and technology transfer. These small beginnings have the potential to lay the foundation of the regional South Asia programme. We also acknowledge that there were failures, particularly in our inability to address sustainability of initiatives that were heavily project dependent, donor driven and prone to weaknesses of partners including government to play a committed and supportive role particularly in the post project scenario. The next country strategy 2012-17 will hopefully address these issues. A major thrust of the new strategy will be on the energy sector based on the theme of universal access to energy. I will end my message by saying that whatever achievements we claim and failures that we experienced cannot be attributed to any single entity and need to be acknowledged jointly with all stakeholders with whom we closely collaborate. B A major thrust of the new strategy will be on the energy sector based on the theme of universal access to energy. ANNUAL REPORT 2011 03
Practical Action,