Centre for Women and Children Studies - CWCS

CWCS was established in April 1994 to primarily act as a pressure group to lobby with the policy planners and decision-makers. The Centre is a research based organization working on women and children issues for advocacy with policy planners since its inception. It is one of the pioneering organization in the country and has conducted more than 20 research studies on gender and children issues. The Centre also implemented 13 projects on human trafficking issues. Since 1998, the Centre has been developing training manuals to provide training for law enforcement officials on gender violence including trafficking and undertaken 6 projects to impart training for police officials with a view to developing pro-women, child-friendly and gender sensitive policing so that women and children get easy access to justice when they need legal support. In 1997, the Centre had launched Traffic Watch Bangladesh (TWB), the first network in Bangladesh to combat human trafficking collectively. Presently TWB consists of more than 400 grassroots and national level NGOs and these organizations are working in prevention, protection and prosecution of human trafficking cases throughout Bangladesh. Although CWCS is a Dhaka based organization, it has experience to work for safe migration to combat human trafficking in most of the traffic prone and bordering districts of the country in collaboration with TWB member organizations. Since 2005, the Centre has been a member of the GO-NGO Coordination Committee to Combat Human Trafficking formed under the leadership of the Ministry of Home Affairs and also member of various committees such as Steering Committee as well as Implementation Committee for formulating the draft Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act, 2012, Committee for formulating rules of the above mentioned law and Committee of National Plan of Action (NPA) for Combating Human Trafficking 2012-2014, 2015-2017 and 2018-2022. CWCS is also performing the responsibility.