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Contact person
Rafiqul Islam Khokan

Founder & Executive Director

Rupantar

E m@il – rafiq@ruantar.org

Web- www.rupantar.org
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Organization Overview

Rupantar is registered as NGO in December 1992. The field activities of Rupantar

started in 1995 initially with cultural activities using alternative theatre, folk drama and
popular publications for the grassroots poor male-female. Rupantar has always been
implementing new activity with the past field experience and learning. Rupantar to-day
stands as a unique development organization with special characteristics towards
contributing in mainstream development process in Bangladesh. Rupantar started
research with the local folk culture of the Sundarbans Region to find out the scope for
mainstreaming the folk culture in development. After a great deal of research Rupantar
identified a number of about to be extinct folk cultural media that were used as
education and communication media in the past. These cultural media are being
developed and updated to be used as communication media. One of the important
media is the POT SONG. The Pot song got extinct in the last one hundred years or so.
Rupantar became acquainted with this form of cultural media from a few old cultural
activists of the Sundarbans area in the year 1996. The awareness at the grassroots
level through theatre and popular publication became well known to many in a very short
period of time. The methodology of awareness campaign using cultural media and
popular publication is known as "Rupantar Method of Development Communication" and
it drew the attention of many government and non-government organizations and
international development communication specialists. And thus Rupantar continue to
receive due advantages of receiving donors funding for various projects.

In course of very short span of time Rupantar at present is working in partnership with
donors like SDC, USAID, VSO Bangladesh, OXFAM-GB, ACTIONAID, LGED, Sida-
Swedish ITI, The Asia Foundation, AED, ATSEC, CARE-Bangladesh, BCCP and CARE-
SHOUHARDO with projects dealing with Women leadership development
(empowerment) at the grassroots level, Improving local level governance by
strengthening Union Parishads, Reducing vulnerability to Climate Change, Environment
and Disaster management, Reflect education and awareness, Water resource
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management, Bio-diversity Conservation of the Sundarbans, Women Empowerment at

the Union Parishads level, Reducing Violence against women and gender disparity,
Prevention of trafficking of women and children, Child Theatre Education, Adolescents
Reproduction Health Communication etc.

Rupantar has the view of working for the people without going for any direct service
delivery like services on health, education, relief, rehabilitation and micro-credit.
Rupantar believes that people if are aware of their problems and go for solution with
determination, can effectively do everything at their own initiative for their own
betterment and development. Development is a long-term process and calls for people's
participation in the right direction with aspirations. Rupantar works in the establishment
of people's rights, aware the people for the right direction with positive outlook for
development through the utilization of Rupantar Method of Development
Communication. Most of the people of Rupantar come from the folk cultural atmosphere
and so continue to search for better forms of communication process for cultural media
and popular publication.

The cultural activity of Rupantar also encompasses the Grassroots Theatre Forum, a
networking of cultural groups of the southwestern region of Bangladesh and perhaps, it
is the biggest cultural network of the country having 58 cultural organizations as
members.

Vision of Rupantar

Rupantar envisages establishing a democratic society with gender equality and cultural
values, free from hunger and injustice, through sustainable development of men and
women who are downtrodden, deprived of rights and opportunities.
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Mission of Rupantar

Rupantar is committed to:

• establish democracy and good governance at the grass-roots level through

peoples’ participation;

• promote human rights including rights of women, children, persons with

disabilities and other marginalized groups;

• resuscitate, preserve and foster folk culture forms and methods;

• conserve natural bio-diversity and environment; and

• Enhance peoples’ capacity to cope with climate change and natural disasters
impacts.
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Findings & Analysis

Findings –

• After interviewing Mr Rafiqul Islam Khokan we get to know about their traning &
development system, we found that they provide a good source of training to the
employees. They emphasize more on training because they are a nonprofit
organization and they don’t have microcredit system in the organization. So they
have to aware the people especially the local people under the local government
since it’s an awareness spreading organization training is very important for them
so they when needed take training from the local government and spread it to the
local people. But they have some training methods which we have learnt from our
text books like on the job training, lecture sessions, in house training sessions,
out house training, MBO etc.

• Connection with the local people is their main task, for this reason they need
proper guidance as well as performance appraisal. Rupantar has self evaluation
system, graphical rating scales, gender cell evaluation, supervisors also play an
important role in evaluating an employee.
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Analysis –

Training & Development In Rupantar -

Rupantar as a nonprofit organization aims to provide its employees proper training and
resources that would help the employees to connect with the purpose in a very fast and
easy way.

Their main purpose is to make the employee think or take the as it is his/her own
organization. They provide trainings like

On the job training, when a new employee enters into the organization he/she lacks
information about the organization so they provide them an appropriate orientation that
helps them to know about his/her responsibilities. According to the Executive Director,
“the moment we start sharing our culture, norms, rules and every do’s and don’ts of the
organization to the employee, his/heron the job training starts”. So they start giving
accurate knowledge about the job as soon as the employee enters into the office. After
proper orientation his/her main job starts when the supervisor of the employee providing
him/her resources to work.

Informal learning is again related to on the job training in Rupantar. They have the
culture to support every colleague and subordinates in a very friendly way. As we learnt
from the text is very similar with the people of Rupantar believe, informal learning
system helps the employee learn very quickly. Example given by Mr. Rafiq when a new
employee comes to the organization then other senior or experienced employees are
told to keep the new person always with him have the lunch together, take him to the
Bank while transferring monetary issues etc. he said these things gives the new
employee a chance to learn and be friendly with his/her colleague too.

Lecture based training systems, Rupantar has an training and development team which
supplies training for the new and old employees in several issues like management, HR,
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theatre etc also the organization organizes several training sessions provided by
expertise of the field which also they call in house training. They hire one or more
expertise for several training sessions that provides them to learn. For example as
Rupantar has the biggest folk theatre in Asia so the organization hires many famous
people who do theatre and drama in Dhaka theatre for their theatre to train the
members. In this kind of training they use various games, role play or job related task to
perform.

Rupantar also gives chance to take several Distance training, what they call actually out
house training which already discussed they sent their employees to take training
provided by many famous and big BGO’s like Brac as well as by the government
institutions. In case of its IT department they sent their employees to take training of new
and innovative programs. Also whenever they feel an employee from any department
needs computer driving training they sent them for the training.

Apprenticeship training, according to the executive director Rupantar has a very open
place for the students who are doing internships and also they welcome people who
want to earn money while studying, for example they provide jobs in their theatre,
people who are poor want support their family. Also they provide job places for
volunteers who want to join the organization for gathering experience versatility. For
example they have a foreign volunteer now working in the organization.

In Rupantar actually there is a little difference in training systems. But people who are
“considered” as non manager they get less out house training than the managerial level
officers. When a new employee enters he/she is given orientation which is quite like a
discussion session in that session he/she is being shown some video clips, power point
presentations by the supervisor. Also she has been given a manual that includes all the
rules and regulations of the organization.

They have both formal and informal way of selecting employees who they feel need
training. They always get information from the supervisors about what is his lacking and
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what kind of training he should be given. Also during in house training sessions or during
practical jobs tasks when they feel the new employee needs training trainer submit a
written report to the particular department and then the department executives take
initiative to send the employee for training.

Evaluating if an employee needs training for a particular purpose is also a matter of

seeing the annual performance appraisal. According to the Executive Director, he said
they use their annual appraisal system where they forgone every details of an employee
whether a new employee or an existing employee needs training or not. Sometimes they
are offered for some new and short term training programs or graduation programs by
many well known universities of the world, for example they have taken a few training
program from the “La Saala” university of Philippines and a short term graduation
program from Duke university of USA. In case of their theatre team they are also
sometimes being sent for sharing their culture to another country and learn from the
their own drama and theatre culture as well, for example they have been to countries
like Sweden, China, Laos etc.

When an employee is sent for a training program they want the employee to achieve as
many as they can from the training, may be he/she will be given to lead a particular
project after having training. Evaluation after training depends on the trainings
importance and the employee’s position in the organization. If the employee is new then
the normal evaluation procedure will be followed and if he/she is an experienced
employee then he/she might have to lead a certain team in a project in which formerly
he/she was only a member. The annual report or the success of the project itself then
would work as an evaluation procedure.
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Performance appraisal in Rupantar –

According to Mr Rafiqul Islam Khokan he described as a NGO they have many projects
with many foreign embassies like USAID, SWISS embassy, embassy of Sweden, UK
etc. also many internal organizations of those countries. They share many projects with
Khulna University as well. So as they have so many projects. They at first set goal
project by project. As they have to face both internal and external auditing they have to
carefully run every project so that the project meets their goal. And for that purpose
every member of every project they have to do their works properly. Every project leader
has got a performance appraisal task to fulfill. So they have to set a standard which
every employee have to meet which is similar with MBO (Management by Objective).

In case of the performance appraisal every employee at first have to go through a self
evaluation, in which he/she has to evaluate his performance throughout the year, also
the problems he faced while working and what he expects from the job in the upcoming
year.

Another type is supervisor continuous effort which is both formal and informal; a
supervisor of an employee continuously tries to inform the higher officials about the
performance of the employee may be just verbally, in addition to formal evaluation they
use an evaluation which like Graphical rating scale but it involves some written part
where they have describe things about the employee.

One innovative thing in this organization is they believe in gender equality so they are
very strict when it comes to gender issues. They have a code of conduct that describes
things that fall under zero tolerance, gender issues is one of the most important to fall
under it. They call it “Gender cell evaluation” where they take written information about
every employee regarding their behavior towards opposite gender.

There are no significant differences between managerial and non managerial

performance appraisal but in case of their drama and theatre forum they don’t have a
strong evaluation system as they are done in the basis of verbal representation. In
theatre they have more than 14 teams, so in this case if one performer is not doing well
in a team, they can obviously switch his/her team.
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To have a fair and equitable evaluation Rupantar not only relying on self evaluation they
want to have every information about a particular employee, so they try to do a proper
performance appraisal. They arrange an annual stuff conference where awards are
given to the employee who have done great job last year. That helps them to motivate
the employee.

Conclusion
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In last words we can say that Rupantar has got a good recruitment and selection
process as well. They want to ensure that the best person or the right person is selected
for the job, because without right person output of the organization will not be as
successful as they want. The organization wants to recruit persons who can adjust the
environment and adapt the working culture very quickly. For that they use conventional
ways with some new terms like ‘Head Hunting’, they also provide notices in the rural
areas like HAT, BAZAR etc crowded place, so that everyone from the grassroot level
gets the opportunity of employment. As an NGO has a commendable training and
development system. They have a proper evaluation system that ensures which
employee needs training and how to evaluate them after having the training. They
believe without providing the right resources no organization can achieve its goal. For
having a successful company or organization, it is very important to give the employees
best possible resources that can help them to work for the organization. In terms of
performance appraisal they want evaluate every employee by giving and providing them
proper sets of performance appraisal system.

Recommendation
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1. Rupantar as an organization needs to be more IT friendly. Though they are using

computers for working purposes but they should focus on the internet based
learning. They should provide more resources to their employees so that they get
more access to attain the organizations goals

2. After taking the interview I get know that they normally don’t send their new
employees for training outside the organization before his job age crosses 3 or 4
months because they want to know that the person is not going to leave the
organization. But in the mean time they should send the employees for training, in
this case they can make these jobs contractual.

3. They have several projects running all over the country so they can obviously use
job rotation that gives the employees chance to know about every project and
choose another if he is not capable of doing well in a particular job.

4. After receiving training the organization evaluation process is the annual

appraisal system. But they can use more versatile tasks to evaluate them as soon
as they come back from the training so that an instant evaluation can be held.

5. In case of orientation they use the supervisors mainly for the to give necessary
information about the organization, apart from the top level executives they don’t
really provide such orientation like video or multimedia presentation, power point
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presentation etc. They should make these things available for all the manager or
executive level.

6. Rupantar can use online performance appraisal system as they have an intranet
in the organization, by that everyone can submit their part of performance
appraisal online.

7. Rather than using self evaluation they can use performance appraisal interviews
for instance it will help the organization to know directly from the employee and
also a friendly relation would be maintained between the higher –mid – lower
level employees. In case of self evaluation people often rank or see them higher
than what he’s actually done.
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Glossary

Gender Cell Evaluation

A performance appraisal system used by Rupantar where attitude towards opposite

gender is evaluated.

In house training

Training sessions arranged in the office are called In house training sessions.

Out house training

Employees when have to go outside of the organization, may be any other organization
or place is called out house training.

Rupantar Institute of Folk and drama

A theatre program runs by Rupantar to aware people to do their tasks as a citizen of the
local government. For that they use folk as a media of connecting to the people. They
have formed a theatre institution where dramas, folk songs (POT) are represested in
front of the audience.

Head Hunting

A way by which they offer expertise to be their advisor or to join as a top level executive
in the organization.
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References

• Interview of the Executive Director

• Conversation with the assistant director

• Website browsing – www.rupantar.org

• Information about rupantar from www.wikieducator.com