Sida supports civil society organisations (CSOs) in Bangladesh and works to enhance capacity of the organisations to advocate for gender equality, human rights, women's participation in decision-making, women's access to the labour market, improved health care, sexual reproductive health and combating violence against women. The support to CSOs is an important element of the Swedish support to strengthening human rights and democracy in Bangladesh, and it is a strategic choice to use CSOs as a counterpart to the underdeveloped democracy and polarized political climate.
The objective of the assignment is to conduct annually assessments of the Swedish Embassy in Bangladesh's CSO partners' capacity in terms of gender equality and human rights. Sida applies a gender and rights-based perspective to development cooperation by ensuring that the four HRBA principles of participation, non-discrimination, transparency and accountability guide the implementation of all contributions supported by Sweden. It is therefore important for Sida to assess to what extend CSO partners actually understand gender equality and human rights and applies these concepts in practice.
The capacity assessments concern potential and current partner CSOs, and will be conducted on an annual basis from 2015-2019. The guiding principles for the assessments will be  a human rights based approach and the gender@work analytical framework. The gender@work framework is applied to assess the level of internalisation of concepts at an informal/individual level, as well as what formal systems exist to institutional level. This framework will ensure tracking organisational changes and capacity development over time and will guide Sida's ongoing capacity development of the CSOs within gender equality, human rights and a human rights based approach to programming. The result of qualitative analysis of each organization will be translated into a numeric index, grading organizational capacity on gender equality as well as human rights according the Gender Results Effectiveness Scale (GRES).

- Development of CSO capacity assessment tools, including self assessment tool, staff survey tools and interview guides;
- Four annual capacity assessment of CSOs with a focus on learning and building capacity within gender equality and human rights;
- Desk study of CSOs' knowledge products and project documents to harvest results of interventions;
- Provision of clear and practical recommendations for improving capacity;
- Indexation of CSOs' capacity in terms of performance. The assessments will grade the organisations on a scale from 1 to 5 from human rights and gender negative through to human rights and gender transformative according to the Gender results effectiveness scale (GRES).