Solution Exchange is presently at work in 6 countries worldwide, with more than 30,000 members in over 20 communities that are organized around national development priorities.

As a steadily developing country and one that has been at the cutting edge of development knowledge for decades, Bangladesh is home to a wide range of programs, and initiatives that are providing innovative solutions to unique challenges.  Such projects, research and works of dedicated organizations have generated voluminous data, information and knowledge on important development issues and agendas.

Solution Exchange in Bangladesh seeks to provide a theme/issue-specific platform for development practitioners to connect with their peers to share their experiences and knowledge to help find practical solutions to problems.  This is done through the tools and services that SolEx officers such as networking, responding to queries, providing consultations, carrying out desk research and when needed, piloting action research.

Solution Exchange in Bangladesh also functions as a service to the Local Consultative Group (LCG) coordination mechanism helping to make important development policy, planning, decisions and feedback may effective for all concerned.

A “Community of Practice” is a group of practitioners sharing common goals in their respective filed of practice.  ‘Practitioners’ in the Solution Exchange community is anyone who has experience in and a desire to contribute to finding solutions to pressing development problems in Bangladesh.  This may include membership by researchers, academics, NGOs, development organizations and partners, local administration, beneficiary groups, and policy makers – Solution Exchange provides a platform for this community to connect, collaborate and share applied practices and learning based on trust, professional insight and real life experiences.

Community members are encouraged to post “queries” on burning issues in their field of practice for practical solutions and/or innovative ideas and comments from other members.  A community facilitator processes the queries, sends them out to the members, receives and synthesizes the answers, consults special experts, carries out secondary research, ultimately providing the larger community with a “consolidated reply” on the topic discussion.  All this is done within 1-3 weeks, ensuring that queries and responses are fresh, relevant and applicable.

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Community members can send questions for further explanation, information, clarification to the larger group.  The facilitator first reads through the question and sends to the members and resource group for various responses.  The responses are then presented to the original inquirer and the community as a Consolidated Reply (CR)

Members may want comments and further suggestions on a subject matter/document.  The query can be constructed for further comments on specific draft plan/policy/project related papers. 

The Facilitation Team conducts the necessary desk research for any query as additional support to the responses.  This includes literature review and consultations with resource groups to find relevant documents and information in regards to the query.

There may be a ground breaking query that requires further investigation through immediate primary research.  Action research can be initiated/commissioned as part of the fact finding mission for the query at hand.