June 2026
Dear friends and partners,
When CHRSD was founded in 2023, a group of researchers and community organisers in Dhaka asked a simple question: what would it take for the most marginalised people in Bangladesh to shape the policies that governed their own lives? The Centre for Humanitarian Research and Social Development was built on that question. It remains the animating force behind everything we do today.
Bangladesh is at a pivotal moment — in poverty reduction, in women's empowerment, in climate adaptation, and in the digital transformation of public services. Yet the distance between policy intent and lived community experience remains as wide as ever in too many places. Filling that gap — with evidence, with advocacy, and with direct action — is CHRSD's mandate.
A year of measurable progress
This year has been one of our most consequential. The National Smart Afforestation & Digital Monitoring Programme reached its first major milestone: over 8 crore saplings planted and digitally tracked across fourteen districts, with a verified survival rate of 71% — well above the national average. For each of those trees, there is a community member who planted it, a field technician who recorded its GPS coordinates, and a satellite image confirming it is still standing.
The Smart Digital Attendance Management System is now operational in over 12,000 government primary schools. Teacher accountability is improving, and — more importantly — children are learning in classrooms that are reliably staffed. The data tells a clear story; the families we have spoken to in the field tell an even clearer one.
Our human rights team has provided free legal assistance to 340 individuals this year — people who could not otherwise have accessed a lawyer. Our socio-economic research division published three peer-reviewed studies on labour market informality and its relationship to extreme weather events. These are not numbers on a dashboard. They are people, households, and communities.
What we are learning
Scale without depth is a trap. We have been deliberate this year about asking not just how many but how sustainably. Are the trees we plant surviving because communities feel ownership over them — or because we are monitoring them? Are the schools we support improving because teachers are accountable to data — or because they feel respected and resourced? These are uncomfortable questions. We are building evaluation frameworks that force us to answer them honestly.
We are also learning about the limits of technology. GIS and satellite monitoring are powerful tools — but they work only when layered onto deep community relationships. Data collected without trust is data collected badly. CHRSD's comparative advantage has always been that combination: rigorous methodology with genuine community embeddedness. We will not sacrifice the second for the first.
The road ahead
In the coming year we will launch Phase II of NSADMP, targeting an additional 10 crore trees in coastal Bangladesh — a region facing acute climate stress. We will expand our legal aid programme into three new districts. And we will begin a multi-year evaluation of SDAMSMP to determine whether attendance improvements are translating into learning outcomes.
None of this is possible without you — our volunteers, donors, partners, and the communities who open their doors to our field teams. Thank you for your trust. We do not take it lightly. We publish our audited accounts, our evaluation reports, and our programme data precisely because accountability to you is not a compliance exercise — it is the foundation of everything we do.
There is always a way. We keep finding it, together.