Social
Policy Unit
The Social Policy Unit conducts
research and fosters discussion on all aspects of social policy. The aim is to
reflect the experiences and views of the rights holders on policy
interventions, and to communicate research findings with stakeholders in
thinking through their implications with a view to bringing about change. The
main topics of inquiry are: education, health, women and children.
Programme
Areas
§
Education
The Unit promotes
education as a basic human right, and provides citizen’s reports on
interventions in the field of education to help mobilizes public pressure on
governments and the international community to fulfil their promises,
including free, compulsory public basic education for all people. For
its concern with improving the educational process, the Unit encourages
scholarly inquiry and promotes the dissemination and practical application of
research results.
§
Health
The Unit conducts
applied research to
contribute towards ensuring universal access to quality health care, and to hold accountable local authorities, national governments, international
organisations and corporations.
§
Women
The Unit aspires to
influence global debates on women and development by offering holistic analyses
from a Southern perspective that is both grounded in women's experience and
inspired by women's collective strategies and visions.
§
Children
The
Unit’s work is grounded in that all children are equal, and have human rights such
as the right to food, shelter, health care, education and freedom from
violence, neglect and exploitation. The Unit enhances capabilities of campaigns
for long-term change.
Publications
Gender equality has received widespread attention in recent development discourse. The gender equality has often been reduced to numerical parity at the behest of projecting donor’s aid effectiveness and successes of government’s political expediency. The present report contends that view, argues that gender equality is not coherently assimilated neither by the current theoretical trends in education nor by the practices of the formal and informal systems, and provides conceptual clarity.
A gender responsive education, according to the report, must encompass a schooling system, the aim of which is the flourishing of the collective society, the community, as well as the flourishing of the individuals. The report in similar vain outlines an agenda for reform to scale up equality in education.
The current volume Encountering Exclusion reviews the National Education Policy (NEP), National Plan of Action (NPA) and Primary Education Development Programme (PEDP) and other policy instruments, plans and programmes in order to provide domestic discourse on fair share in, and equal access to, primary education, that the poor and marginalised children are able to enroll in and complete quality primary education. The volume offers a point of reference for
citizens' engagement processes on policy design, implementation and outcome in order to identify home grown policy alternatives and to build support for emerging policy options.
many significant groups of people. So far all policy changes have
predominantly focused horizontal expansion for increasing access, while the
exclusion, according to the volume, is rooted not only due to disquiet of
access but also on concerns of equity, relevance and social structure,
thereby relentlessly jeopardising the credibility of public policies. The volume demonstrates that top-down elitist system of education, originally laid down according to policies and framework of colonial administrators, has been in operation with only minor changes and has created many tension points as regards access, equity, relevance and structural dimensions of primary education, and in effect has acted as a vicious circle of injustice. This, according to this volume, has also methodically tended to divorce the people and policy makers in articulating a bottom-up approach to the design and implementation of plans to achieve universal access to primary education.
The study listens to the experiences and perceptions of urban slum-dwellers to understand: (a) the processes and factors leading to the situation; (b) the perception on and experiences of transactional relationship between citizens and state; and
(c) conditions viewed by them as necessary to move out of the situation. The study analyses the application of the methodology of Oral Testimony in order to make it more context specific, user friendly and appropriate.
Focusing on the urban poverty, the study elaborates on the processes which the urban slum-dwellers feel or perceive are responsible for the state of affairs, their state and reasons of exclusion, their views on the relationship between them and the state in terms of identity, services and rights.
The monograph promotes the rights of persons with disabilities in Bangladesh by conducting research on the prevalence through a nationwide representative sample survey, first of its kind in Bangladesh, making an in-depth analysis of causes of disability, and capturing the situation of the disabled in Bangladesh.
Education by definition is a natural ally of equality, if its sole purpose is assumed that the realm of education is enriched the more knowledge is shared and does not exclude others from its possession. But there is a relational aspect to equity, which is shaped in each context by its history, resources, power and ideology. Gender equality in education incorporates in itself not only the notions of numerical parity in access and participation but also equality in terms of outcomes. Viewing that gender discrimination is an expression of a larger system of social injustice, the present volume, contends that any intervention must relate to men’s and women's abilities to utilise their capabilities to realise their self potential while recognising that men's and women's abilities to utilise their capabilities depend on access to resources, entitlements, accountability and equality of opportunities.
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Right to education has not only been promised through the Constitutional directives but also through numerous international Covenants in which Bangladesh is a signatory. Many of such promises carved out in different education policies and programmes, as the volume spells out, have fallen through, becoming rhetoric rather than reality in the education sector since policy changes and resultant programmes neither originate from, nor are designed with, stakeholder participation nor independent of the donors, limiting their acceptability and undermining their
efficacy. The
education system, as the volume elucidates, is elitist and systematically exclude
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English Version:
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Bangla Version:
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Disability in Bangladesh: Prevalence, Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices