1.0 Background:
The Hunger Project (THP)-Bangladesh is the nation’s largest volunteer-driven development organization. The Hunger Project-Bangladesh is an affiliate of the Global Hunger Project, headquartered in New York, a 501c3 organization incorporated in 1977 and in consultative status with the United Nations since 1985. In a radical departure from traditional service delivery approaches and in an intentional drive to overcome Bangladesh’s deeply entrenched mindset of resignation and dependency. The Hunger Project-Bangladesh bases its strategies on the principles of: self-reliance, gender, equality, human dignity, sustainability, volunteerism, and local leadership. It has pioneered women focused, community led strategies to empower rural communities to achieve sustainable progress in women’s leadership, countering violence, promoting peaceful elections and strengthening local government.

The goals of THP are:
GOAL 1: Mobilize Rural Communities for self-reliant action
GOAL 2: Empower Women and Girls
GOAL 3: Strengthen Local Government
GOAL 4: Build Alliances for Advocacy and Action

THP has been implementing a FCDO funded project titled Multi-Stakeholder Initiative for Peace and Stability (MIPS). MIPS seeks to build community-based peace volunteer groups and networks, working to identify, prevent and mitigate incidents of political, religious and ethnic violence across Bangladesh to restore political tolerance and harmony. The project will be implemented in a total of 27 districts, including the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) region, and engage people across political parties and sectors of society, women and youth in activities that seek to improve their knowledge and understanding of the conflicts that influence their everyday lives, as well as enhance their skills to prevent and deal with conflicts in their communities. MIPS is an Adaptive Programme that seeks to make relevant its implementation plan and approaches based on the contextual changes, implementation learning, stakeholders’ recommendations with clear understanding of the stakeholders’ interest, incentive and power to contribute in achieving the project targets. The project will also integrate Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) Approach which will be based on a solid Political Economy Analysis (PEA), data from the baseline, stakeholders’ recommendations, and implementation learning.

To operate the project with the intended approach and principles, the project plans to conduct a baseline study to document the present political, religious and ethnic violence situations in the project working areas including CHT, and shaping up its interventions and implementation approaches based on the baseline findings and recommendations.

2.0 Objective of the baseline:
The overall objective of the baseline is to conduct a landscape analysis over the political, religious, and ethnic violence to provide a reference for all qualitative and quantitative indicators and beyond these, which will allow THP to sharpen its programmatic choice for maximize project impact. 

Specific objectives:

• To assess the KAP (Knowledge, Attitude and Practice) of the Peace Facilitators, civil society representatives, and religious leaders towards democracy, violence preventions, and political, religious and ethnic tolerance.
• To gather data and information to establish a benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness and impact of the project.
• To identify the key indicators and establish a baseline for each and collect relevant data to measure progress overtime.
• To document the incidences/ frequency, and types of political, religious, and ethnic violence situations in the project working areas.
• To document the underlying and root causes of political, religious, and ethnic violence, and their consequences.
• To identify the barriers to improvements in peace and stability, including from a gender and inclusion angle, both at policy and community perceptions level.
• To document key actors’ interest, motivation, and actions/ gap in actions in reducing/ controlling the violence in their localities.
• To develop the stakeholders/ key actors mapping who are working in the same field including NGOs/ INGOs and/or other entities in the project working areas, and at the national level.
• To analyze and document, risk, learning (if any), challenges of, and recommendations towards MIPS project. 
• To analyze the gender and social inclusion possibilities in prevention of political, religious and ethnic violence and improve tolerance.

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