With a view to promote women’s perspectives and roles in developing local and national policies and strategies and building peaceful and resilient communities to prevent violent extremism in Bangladesh, BNPS started to implement a project ‘Empowered Women Peaceful Communities’ since May 2017 with support of UN Women.

In collaboration with local CSOs and women organizations, BNPS successfully organized 21 district and 7 divisional workshops aiming to gather and mobilize stakeholder’s views and opinion on women’s priorities and contributions in aspect of Women, Peace and Security (WPS), Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), UN Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325. The participants brought their collective recommendations following four pillars of WPS framework: Prevention, Participation, Protection, Relief and Recovery. More than 150 consolidated recommendations were come from these workshops. All the recommendations highlighted the areas of women’s participation in decision making and leadership, economic empowerment, legal support and effective role of judiciary, policy implementation and policy reform, access to resources, job opportunities and civic entitlements, promoting peace building processes in the context of rising violent extremism, fundamentalism, discrimination and gender based sexual violence, disaster, displacement and other relevant issues.

Majority participants expressed their views in a way that WPS, PVE and SCR almost were new ideas and thoughts to them but many opportunities are there to work on these issues at local level because of increasing trend of sign and symptom related to religious extremism and hate speech against women, where women can play important role to promote peace and social harmony, if they are provided with adequate knowledge, skills and supportive enabling environment.

All the grassroots recommendations were finally shared in a national seminar held on 24th Jan 2018 at Dhaka where Dr. Shirin Sharmin Choudhury, Honorable Speaker of the Bangladesh Parliament graced the event as the Chief Guest. Ms. Sanjida Khanm, Member of Parliament, Ms. Shoko Ishikawa, Country Representative, UN Women Bangladesh and Prof. Meghna Guhathakurta, Member of Human Rights Commission, Bangladesh and lead consultant for the development of the National Action Plan WPS were present as special guests. Among others, representatives from Women Organizations, CSOs, NGOs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Women, Ministry of Law, Development Partners and Media joined this event. Chief Guest and Special Guest conveyed sincere thanks to the grassroots communities particularly women for bringing these quality and meaningful recommendations and expected that the core committee of NAP would consider it with special care.

Upon invitation, BNPS attended the core committee meeting of NAP and presented consolidated recommendations of district and divisional workshops there. The meeting members sincerely acknowledged that these recommendations would help them a lot in developing the NAP.