The Capacity Building of Ultra Poor (CUP) Project, funded by Oxfam Novib, has been designed for the ultra poor people, with particular focus on women, of the charlands of Shariatpur and Chandpur districts aiming at improving livelihood situation of the targeted families. Main components of the Project include mobilization, awareness raising, advocacy, promotion of livelihood, disaster preparedness and non-formal primary education.

Goal of the Project

Capacity building of disaster prone vulnerable people through promotion of livelihood, develop life skills, resource mobilization and to create resource provision.

Project objective

Building capacity, increasing livelihood options, preventing domestic violence against women and creation of measure for mitigating disaster.

The area covered under the Project, launched on Pilot basis, is a total of 7 riverbank unions of Goshairhat and Damuddya Upazila of Shariatpur and Sadar upazila of Chandpur districts. Interventions of the Project are Staff orientation on Project activities, secondary information collection, flood impact study on school and students, Rapid assessment of SIDR, village list finalization based on specific criterion, Orientation on socio-economic baseline survey: community situation profiling, ultra poor household benchmark survey, post SIDR medical support, Socio-Economic baseline in CUP working area, PIC formation and Ultra poor group formation.

ii) Orientation on CUP Project:

According to HR, newly recruited staffs should be attending a day long orientation. In 2007 a daylong orientation Course for capacity building of the newly recruited staffs of CUP Project has been organized on November 12, 2007. Objectives of the course were to orient the staffs to make them understand the SDS and the CUP Project, to build common understanding among the newly recruited staffs about the Project, to raise conception level of the staffs on the organizational aspects of CUP Project and its activities in detail, its strategies and to aware them of the HR issues of SDS.

In order to make the newly recruited staffs well equipped, strengthen their capacity and increase efficiency, the course contents have been outlined with adequate understanding and state of affairs. The course content included background of the organization and the CUP Project, discussion on ultra poor, method of identifying ultra poor, working out the strategies for capacity building of the ultra poor, secondary information collection, team formation and Action plan preparation for secondary information collection of ultra poor from villages and unions.

The core activities elaborately discussed in the course were mobilization, advocacy related activities, awareness raising activities, promotion of livelihood activities, primary education for the children of riverbank (isolated char), capacity building activities and research and document activities. Tools and techniques exercised during the session to make it more efficient were group discussion among the participants, lectures, visualization, group work, discussion with multimedia presentation and question and answer round among the participants.