From the beginning, RRN has been extensively engaging in implementing various integrated community development programmes and projects across the country. From 1989 to 2010, it has worked with over 1,000,000 community people through the formation and strengthening of thousands of local people’s institutions. RRN’s interventions basically included creating an enabling environment conducive to making the people aware of their economic social and cultural rights and right to development, besides capacitating them to claim such rights and feel a sense of ownership over the local development programmes, rather than delivering the social and economic services from elsewhere. In doing so, RRN realises that, as an NGO, it has not only fulfilled its obligation of contributing to the mainstream development process of the country but also to mobilising the potential actors responsible for framing policies and intervening  development programmes at all levels.

While designing the development projects, RRN always emphasises the pro-poor people national policies as well as the internationally agreed development goals, commitments, targets and declarations that came out of different Summits, Conferences, Meetings and Assemblies such as United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), World Summit on Sustainable Development, World Summit for Social Development, IV World Conference on Women, World Food Summit, Millennium Summit (that yielded Millennium Declarations embedding Millennium Development Goals -MDGs), UN III Conference on LDCs (resulting into Brussels Programme of Action-BPoA), International Conference on Financing for Development, Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (that resulted into Accra Agenda for Action), etc. Similarly, during the implementation of the programmes and projects, RRN consciously thinks of making the projects work for the people by genuinely channelling the resources from diverse sources to cater the basic needs of the people who are at the bottom of current social as well as economic structures of the society. In this sense, to a greater extent, RRN has been able to facilitate the process of giving clout to the powerless for amplifying their voices to be heard by those who are in the position of making decisions for the betterment of the people.

Intervention modality

In order for meaningful implementation of RRN’s integrated community development programmes and projects, it considers the following modalities: (i) the poverty stricken and remote areas inhabited by the poor and vulnerable people who are deprived of minimal access to the mainstream development opportunities, (ii) genuine participation of the target beneficiaries through their self-help groups, (iii) partnership with potential stakeholders, (iv) community’s demand, and (v) inclusive and democratic governance, human rights and rights to development as mandatory. Taking these distressed situations as development challenge, we have pursued a variety of development projects aimed at providing sustainable impacts on the communities by meeting their immediate needs of livelihoods infrastructure and income generation, and creating an enabling environment for their social protection and reducing the potential for conflict and supporting peace building by strengthening their own organisations so that the most vulnerable communities of the society can assure their basic human rights and right to development.  Each programme and project is characterised by its own objectives, components, and the target population to be served. A glimpse of RRN’s development programmes and projects that are in operation in the year of 2010 has been illustrated below.