Research Initiatives, Bangladesh (RIB) was established in 2002 with financial support from the Royal Dutch Government under its MMRP program and it was established by a group of educators, social scientists, researchers, and human rights activists who shared a commitment to creating space for marginalized communities to participate in research and development processes. Its main objective is to support research aimed at identifying strategies and programs that could ensure sustainable, progressive alleviation of poverty in Bangladesh. Despite the efforts of successive Governments and many NonGovernment Organizations (NGOs) working over the years on poverty mitigation in the country, there are still serious and unresolved issues concerning the self-sustaining potential of these efforts. Lack of peoples participation in problem identification and program design, imposition of donor goals and priorities, predetermined resource modalities, lack of local resource mobilization and ownership, and continuing donor funds and expertise dependency often lead to the withering away of these projects soon after the departure of external partners or their resources.

In this milieu, RIB’s approach has been to involve participatory processes from the very design and conception of the research proposal, through the implementation phase to its final presentation, validation and follow up by the researchers and/or community being researched. In this effort we found that the Participatory Action Research (or gonogobeshona as it has come to be called in Bangla), promoting processes of collective self-enquiry, self-determination and capacity building, to be a useful method in reaching out to many marginalized communities. Often these communities are not found to be in the development agenda or mainstream Governmental or Non-governmental development agencies and are hence termed as the missing communities.

Being an institution interested in creating a knowledge-based society, RIB encourages an approach where local knowledge is as valued as expert knowledge and in RIB’s research findings it has been found that sustainability of a program lay in demand-led focus, participatory processes, a program designed to respond to needs and priorities as identified and owned by the people, and on local resource mobilization and self-reliance.

Furthermore, the most critical finding concerning hardcore poverty prevailing among the missing communities was that economic poverty is inextricably linked to social exclusion, deprivation of civic and land rights and denial of access to public services including health, education, credit and hence any strategy for their alleviation needs to take a holistic approach. This is evident in many of the follow-up activities which RIB’s research communities have taken, e.g. social mobilization to spread lac cultivation among the landless and land-poor to prevent Monga, the inclusion of education as a basic strategic right along with the need for diversifying livelihoods among the growing Dalit movement and perpetrating selfmanagement skills through reflective thinking, such as, in the case of vegetable gardening in cyclone affected areas or establishing nurseries of indigenous fruit trees in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

For more than two decades, RIB has developed and refined a distinctive participatory research methodology, enabling communities to identify their own concerns, investigate the underlying causes of exclusion and inequality, generate evidence, and take collective action. RIB’s work has evolved from community-based participatory research to broader programmes addressing governance, transparency and accountability, human rights, climate change and organic farming, gender, social inclusion, peacebuilding, migration, access to rights and public services.

Today, RIB continues to build on more than twenty-four years of experience, connecting community knowledge with research, policy dialogue, institutional accountability, and citizen action.