Activities in Rural Areas

Two main activities are:

1.Support forming Samittee
Samittee, is a mutual support group for people in the village to save and borrow money, according to their situation. Recently, we have expanded our project sights to regions called Char where the living conditions of the people are more sever than in other areas.

2. Support Recovering Social Networks
We not only support the poor directly but also, indirectly. We reach the people surrounding the poor and try linking local leaders, people in the middle class and the government officials to recover the mutual help function that the villagers had before.

Other than these activities, we support children working in the markets of the village, and shops in the city.

Activities in Urban Areas

Since 2001, SHAPLA NEER had been supporting Street Children in urban areas.

1.Supporting Street Children
With partnership of local NGO , "Aparajeyo Bangladesh" in Dhaka, SHAPLA NEER had supported Street Children through "Street School" and "Drop In Centre" projects. For further information, visit http://www.aparajeyo.org/index.html

2.Defining Problems of Street Children
Evaluation had been conducted to reexamine the past effort in 2005. Two main findings were:

1) Living conditions of the children is improving
2) Understanding of activities by the region were not enough.

Taking these findings into account, SHAPLA NEER had decided to strengthen the following two issues.

1)Building relationship with the residents by encouraging establishing volunteer groups.
2)Start supporting girl domestic workers who are almost neglected by the society, but are in severe situation.

Other Activities

Research

To find problems and issues that are cruel, but have not been considered widely we have conducted research for labors in tea plantation in 2005. Also, in 2006,we will conduct small scale household survey to areas that had been studied in 1994 and 1995 to evaluate their life improvement.

Disaster Preparedness

Almost every year, Bangladesh had suffered from natural disasters such as flood and cyclones. To minimize the damage we are establishing manuals, and making networks with NGOs specialized in disaster prevention to enable quick response.