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Can NGOs implement rights-based gender equality programs when donor focus on the area is shrinking? This paper explores how one development program has made strategic choices incorporating the interests of multiple stakeholders, addressing donor interests while simultaneously addressing the needs of local communities. It examines the evolution of BRAC's Polli Shomaj, a rural women's civil society organisation designed to challenge power structures through collective action in rural Bangladesh. It draws on interviews with program staff and existing program literature to find that over time, BRAC leadership has narrowed its program focus to shed its broad transformative agenda to focus solely on gender equality through a combination of service delivery and rights-based approaches. The paper suggests that while it is possible for NGOs to promote gender equality through a combination of rights-based and service-delivery approaches, greater focus is needed on challenging power structures to bring about lasting structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equitable futures depend upon better employment outcomes for young women. We use a skills ecosystems approach to explore how youth skills development programs can maximise their impact in highly gendered societies and labour markets. While improving employment outcomes and incomes for young women, BRAC's STAR program cannot withstand Bangladesh's deep-rooted and socially restrictive norms and practices. Short-term successes are diluted as family pressures and commitments take precedent over young women's economic lives. Adding a temporal dimension to the concept of skills ecosystems, these findings highlight that maintaining these impacts requires constant renegotiation and advocacy to challenge the structural obstacles within households and labour markets and within national policies and investments that constrain their longer-term economic empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BRAC's focus on women and community organisations in the 1970s was lauded as bringing forth "a quiet revolution." We explore the evolution of BRAC's selected programs that built community forums and argue that while BRAC successfully retained its focus on women's inclusion, its approach to collective empowerment is marked by contradictions. The shifts in funding structures that emphasised individual empowerment, the organisation's emphasis on scaling up programs at the expense of investing in building community organisations, and the accommodation of patriarchal norms to prevent backlash from local actors – all resulted in trade-offs, limiting programming on collective empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]