The name “Nagorik Uddyog” (“The Citizen’s Initiative”) epitomizes the organization’s fundamental goal as well as the strategies and activities it utilizes to achieve this goal. Specifically, since its establishment 1995, Nagorik Uddyog (NU) has worked to strengthen local government in Bangladesh via the dual imperatives of, on the one hand, raising awareness among the general masses of people’s basic human rights and, on the other, building people’s capacity to pursue and realize these rights.
NU recognizes that democratic elections are by themselves insufficient in fulfilling democracy; that the poor, marginalized and disadvantaged must be given the power to participate in and contribute to all those decision-making processes that affect their lives. Accordingly, NU strives to provide an enabling condition for the people to set up institutions and mobilize themselves.
NU holds special interest in democratizing the historically gender-imbalanced “Shalish”, Bangladesh’s traditional rural dispute-resolution system. A fair and equitable Shalish especially entails unprecedented access to justice for rural women – the ‘poorest of the poor’ in this country – and in turn a new and exciting horizon in Bangladesh’s development journey.