Does intensive community mobilizing help households to create better livelihoods? – A synthesis of 200+ micro-narratives of community mobilisers in a slum area in Dhaka

We describe the insights from evaluating a pilot intervention in the Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) programme. The pilot involved intensive social work by community mobilizers in a slum area in Dhaka-Bangladesh, comprising 1,500 households, many of whom work in the leather industry. Each month, each community mobilizer wrote a micro-narrative about their most significant experience. Using Dedoose, the research coded and analyzed the 200+ micro-narratives from the 19 community mobilizers who listened to households and helped them link with the social services and collective action initiatives. The micro-narratives reflect their emotions and evolving insights into the complex household dynamics they encountered between January and December 2022. We want to answer the realist evaluation question, ‘Why does community mobilizing work, for whom, and under what conditions?’, identifying various causal pathways of change. We learned that intra-household conflicts and indebtedness limited livelihood strategies and caused children to continue in work that would qualify as exploitative. Especially for men (and boys), this includes dangerous working conditions and long working hours. Girls have few options for work outside the house due to social norms, sometimes enforced by intra-family violence. The research highlighted the complex intertwining of extreme poverty, local politics, house ownership, family-level conflict, family separation, gambling, and gang violence. We show that intensive unconditional support by community mobilizers in geographically concentrated poverty hotspots helps households to improve their opportunities and capabilities to develop better livelihoods, primarily by making (better) use of existing public and non-governmental services.