ABSTRACT
The author was hired by a US private voluntary organisation (PVO), Pact, and based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, working on a capacity-building project for Bangladeshi CSOs called PRIP. He arrived during a very serious flood in 1989 and became aware of the dynamics of balancing relief and development efforts between the CSOs, the donors and the government. Bangladeshi CSOs were evolving as professional development actors and were working out what this meant in terms of competences and capacities needed. Pact, and others, worked on identifying measures of organisational capacity and then trained organisations to acquire them. Bangladesh’s President Ershad was overthrown in this period and the CSOs were involved in the ensuing political factionalism. The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 introduced the concept of civil society, which added to the intellectual ferment. Then another disaster, the cyclone of 1994, brought CSOs back from development to relief again. Bangladesh was the laboratory for thinking about what CSOs should do and be: it had the two largest NGOs in the world in BRAC and the Grameen Bank, and all kinds of other small and medium CSOs. PRIP evolved from a USAID project into a sustained Bangladeshi trust to continue with the thinking.
