Organization - Rupantar

Rupantar is dedicated to unlocking human potential, empowering people, strengthening democratic practice, promoting cultural diversity and protecting the environment.

Specifically, Rupantar’s role is to:

• Resuscitate, develop and foster folk cultural forms and methods to sensitize grassroots people.
• Build peoples’ capacity to cope with the impacts of climate change and natural disaster and to conserve natural bio-diversity.
• Accelerate social changes through developing coordination with other actors engaged in development fields.
• Establish democracy and governance through people’s participation
• Promote the rights of children, youth, women the differently able and marginalized people.

The field activities of ‘Rupantar’ started in 1995 initially with cultural activities using alternative theatre, folk drama and popular publications for the men and women at grassroot level. ‘Rupantar’ has always been implementing new activity with the past field experience and learning.

‘Rupantar’ started research with the local folk culture of the Sundarbans region to find out the scope for mainstreaming the folk culture in development. After a great deal of research. ‘Rupantar’ identified a number of nearly extinct folk cultural media that were used as education and communication media in the past. These cultural media are being developed and updated to be used as communication media.

The awareness at the grassroots level through theatre and popular publication became well known to many in a very short period of time. The methodology of awareness campaign using cultural media and popular publication is known as “Rupantar Method of Development Communication” and it drew the attention of many government and non-government organizations and international development communication specialists. Thus ‘Rupantar’ continue to receive due advantages of funding for various projects like; UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP, USAID, SDC, GCERF DAI, VSO, OXFAM, LGED, Sida-Swedish ITI, The Asia Foundation, WaterAid and IOM .

The cultural activity of ‘Rupantar’ also encompasses the ‘Grassroots Theatre Forum’, a networking of cultural groups of the southwestern region of Bangladesh and perhaps, it is the biggest cultural network of the country having 58 cultural organizations as members.

‘Rupantar  all  activities/ projects are implementing  under five programmatic areas as follows:

1. Popular Media and Folk theatre

• “Building the Capacity of Community Radio Stations to Undertake Participatory Programme Development and communication using the community Learning programme”
• Conducting Street Drama Rupantar Performances for B-SKILLFUL- Jessore
• “Conducting Interactive Theatre For Community-Led outreach on Safe Migration in 12 Districts”
• “Health Communication and Education through Participatory Learning Models Using Community Radios”
• “Small Scale Water Resource Development Sector Project”

2. Disaster Management and Climate change Adaptation

• “Peoples’ Initiative for conservation of the Sundarbans”
• “Transforming rural livelihood through WASH in Climate vulnerable area in south-west Bangladesh”
• “Enhancing Climate Resilient WASH in Shyamnagar Upazila”

3. Peace & Tolerance

• “Stop Violence Coalition-SVC”
• Promoting Engagement and Action for Countering Extremism (PEACE) Consortium
• Community and Youth Action against Radicalization and Extremism in Khulna (CYARE-Khulna)

4. Democracy and Political Empowerment

• “Grassroots Women’s Leadership (Phase IV)”
• “Promoting Responsiveness and Civic Participation to Establish Urban Governance (PRCP-UG)”
• “Justice for All-Khulna”
• “Strengthening Civic Engagement in Elections and Political Processes for Enhanced Transparency and Democratic Accountability”
• “Strengthening the Integration of quality and Comprehensive health services into Government Health Care system for survivors of human trafficking and abuse in 6 Upazila of Jessore and Satkhira districts in Bangladesh”
• “Justice for All-Jessore”

5. Children and Youth Rights

• “Child Rights and Protection Project”
• “Establishing Child Sensitized Community in the Sundarban Region for Protection and Development of Children and Adolescents”
• “Integrated Children Development Project”
• “Active Citizens Youth Leadership Training (ACTLT)”
• “Girls Advocacy Alliance”