Vulnerable Groups Development (VGD) a project implemented by the government of Bangladesh with support from the food aid donors including the World Food Programme, Australia, Canada, Germany, France and the European Union. The project aims at providing food to the poorest women of rural Bangladesh in exchange of their participation in development works. The project began as a relief programme in November 1975 under the name of Vulnerable Groups Feeding (VGF) with an initial focus on providing food support to destitute women for a two-year period. Under the programme, 780,000 distressed women were given wheat and other commodities for the supplementary feeding. The Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief instituted food distribution through VGF to address the basic needs of women in extreme poverty.

The programme was subsequently oriented towards development and renamed Vulnerable Groups Development (VGD) since the mid-1980s. The new objective was to increase self-reliance of the most disadvantaged women. The government however, reintroduced the VGF in 1997 as a separate project. Within the framework of a new 'Strengthening Institutions for Food Assisted Development' (SIFAD) project, the government transferred administration of the VGD from the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief to the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs in July 1996.

The three major channels of implementation of the VGD project are the Unions, Institutional Feeding and Development Centres (IFDC) and Women Training Centres. Under the Union VGD programme destitute, divorced and abandoned women, under-nourished and lactating women with children, and women with handicapped husbands are given food aid. They are also given skill training in different activities such as sewing, knitting, rearing of livestock and poultry, doll making, boutique work etc to generate self-employment opportunities for the poor women and make them self-reliant. The long-term objective of VGD is to enable the poor and destitute rural women to overcome food insecurity and low social status.

The VGD beneficiaries include women from landless households (owning less than 0.5 acre of land), women with irregular (less than Tk 300 per month) or no individual income, daily or casual women labourers and women from households lacking ownership of productive assets. Under the project, about 0.5 million women-headed households receive 31.25 kg of food-grain for a period cycle of 18 months. New groups of women are brought into the project after graduation of the existing groups. The development programme package of VGD includes savings, group-based social awareness, functional education, skills training in income generating activities and credit. The allocation of foodgrain for the VGD programme in 1999-2000 was more than 192 thousand metric tons. [Helal Uddin Ahmed]