Pragroshor
"A women's right base, Anti-Racist, Anti- Discriminatory Non- Profit Organisation"
Pragroshor
"A women's right base, Anti-Racist, Anti- Discriminatory Non- Profit Organisation"
Our Mission
To contribute to its vision, Pragroshor intends to conduct multisectoral development activities through building organization and supporting the agency of the community e.g., poor women and men, children, adolescence and members from ethnic and religious communities, to fight for and establish their own rights.
Our Vision
Pragroshor envisions a society which is socially just, equitable and nondiscriminatory in which people, irrespective of their religion, ethnicity, gender and physical ability, live in dignity as full members of the society Mission.
About Pragroshor
Pragroshor is a feminist, anti-racist, anti-discriminatory non-profit organization. Pragroshor provides a variety of support to individuals, institutions and communities to be more gender sensitive in their philosophies and practices. It provides training, resources and support to existing women’s and human rights organizations. It also campaigns and lobbies on key gender issues affecting the country and the region.
Since its inception, Pragroshor facilitates the exchange of knowledge among Bangladeshis as well as South Asian gender specialists, feminists and other relevant groups. It develops materials and publications to promote feminist and anti-discriminatory values, and serve as a resource center for documented research and training materials. It also assists other women’s and human rights organizations, identifying common areas of interest, strengthening existing networks and creating new contacts and links. Pragroshor has worked with various feminist networks and organizations, including Sangat Bangladesh and One Billion Rising, to capacitate and mobilize around violence against women and gender inequality. Pragroshor organizes roundtables, dialogues, training and workshops on human rights for development practitioners, HRDS, journalists, students and so on.
Who We Are and Where We Operate
As a feminist and women’s rights organization Pragroshor works for preventing violence against women and girls, transgender women and other minorities along with ensuring gender equality among all sects of people including women, girls, boys, men and LGBTQI+ community. From the very beginning of this organization its main moto was to protect the survivors of SGBV. Pragroshor has been working since 2014 mainly in the Dhaka city. Pragroshor developed a multi-sectoral program that firstly created a platform for connecting survivors of gender-based violence and developing a multi-sectoral, responsive linkage mechanism that linked survivors of SGBV with each other and with other platforms that provide responsive services that seek to empower and positively benefit their livelihood opportunities. In short, Pragroshor developed a model approach that placed the survivors’ needs and voices at the center of all programmatic activities. This is a departure from the more commonly practiced redress and integration mechanism that focuses on the centrality of punitive rights advocacy and promotes and developed an organic, feminist approach that benefits and collectively empowers women and girls directly. It is hoped that such an approach proves to be transformative in addressing marginalization and engendering survivors’ agency and leadership, all of which is central to substantial gender equality.
Pragroshor believes that addressing gender-based violence requires challenging and uprooting patriarchy itself. As such it is organizing feminist consciousness raising sessions, ranging from discussions to workshops to mass mobilizations, for youth, women’s groups, activists and so on to capacitate them to take on leadership positions within the women’s movement and become better equipped to understand and address the root causes of entrenched gender inequality within society. Additionally, it acts as a resource and training centre not just for survivors but for the feminist movement at large. Having been involved for a significant period with the feminist movements originating out of Bangladesh, Pragroshor’s program developers have reasoned that the project will fill a large gap in the grassroots feminist organizing landscape in Bangladesh.
Particularly, the lack of spaces for women and girl survivors of SGBV is a pressing issue that needs immediate remedy. Numerous research initiatives have shown that women and girls are disproportionately at the end of SGBV and this issue is a historical struggle of patriarchal societies across the world. In line with this, the project seeks to create spaces that engender agency and collective empowerment of a historically disenfranchised group with its national Survivors’ Network.
