A small organisation. Sixteen years in the same villages.
Rekha Unnayan Sangstha is a registered non-profit working with farming households and rural workers across coastal and northern Bangladesh. We are not a large NGO — twelve staff, around thirty regular volunteers, and the communities themselves.
Registered with the NGO Affairs Bureau · Charity ID KDM/Sadar/309 · Audited annually
Our mission
To stand with smallholder farmers, women-led households, and rural workers in Bangladesh so their work, voice and choices count in the decisions that affect them.
Our vision
Villages where a family can farm a season without losing the land, send a daughter to school without selling a cow, and walk into a union council meeting expecting to be heard.
Our approach
Long stays, small budgets, plain language. We start with a village meeting, co-design what comes next, publish what we spend, and stay until the work runs itself.
How it started
Rekha Unnayan Sangstha was registered in 2009, but the work began two years earlier in a single village in Khulna, where a school teacher and a retired Department of Agriculture officer sat under a banyan tree with eleven farming families and asked them to list what was breaking. Irrigation pumps, school fees during the monga lean season, and a 9-kilometre walk to the nearest clinic topped the list.
We started by funding a shared diesel pump and a small monthly stipend for two girls in class eight. Both girls finished SSC. The pump is still running — repaired four times, replaced once, now owned by a women's cooperative.
Sixteen years later that pattern still guides us. We don't arrive with a finished programme. We sit with people, we co-design, we put numbers on paper, and we publish what works and what didn't. We are registered with the NGO Affairs Bureau of Bangladesh and audited every year by an independent firm; our financial statements are on the website.