4th of August: a team of ‘humans’ leaves Dhaka in the early hours… destination a ‘popular’ place in Faridpur. Sightseeing? That and more… Trust me when I tell you that the visiting friends from Italy (a Comms. colleague, a holding-it-just-fine journalist and a how-do-I-put-it photographer) did taste a bit of Dhaka traffic even though all that they did was to touchdown, get terminal clearance and pick us (Jamal and Hamid – names we picked up along the way) up from home to leave the city.

After an hour and a half on Dhaka’s crowded roads where the kamikaze bus driver is king, I reach Chanpara slum in Roopgong, just outside of the Bangladeshi capital. The corrugated iron huts are home to 40,000 people – a small slum by Bangladeshi standards – but the problems faced by the residents of Chanpara slum are huge. With shared toilets and bathing areas, and no street lighting, the dark alleys of this slum hold many dangers for the women and girls of the slum.

… purpose, which was only their personal gain and nothing further. Youth were intentionally overlooked for long and it became a practice to accept the societal structure as it was. But being in the same system few youngsters were exceptions and broke the cycle as they decided not to be disregarded for their dreams anymore. Not only did they start a new trend followed by many others, they brought in immense development. Yes! It was the golden Era of Youth revolution and I was so thrilled to have witnessed it.

Being a non-government human rights-based development organization, we, ActionAid always prefers to play the role of facilitator in bringing change and supplement and complement the government’s initiative. Our conviction to work with the government was further strengthened while I was in Tala (sub-district) in Satkhira on 18th April, 2012 along with our Country Director, Farah Kabir. She was there to visit the activities of our ECHO-funded project Emergency Assistance Support to Water Logging Affected Populations in Tala of Satkhira.

We spent significant time on Board development and registration process. The Executive Board and Board Committees were engaged in institutional governance. We also developed Country Strategy Paper – IV and carried out change management. South Asia Social Forum was other major engagement. Besides regular work with long-term, strategic, network and project partners, we facilitated 94 Lokokendras (people’s organisations), 18 Self-Help Groups and 813 village farmers’ associations.

The recent experience from the field-visit to Faridpur has sketched deep mark on my mind when I saw community people reaping the benefit of the initiatives at the very inception of a project because of comprehensiveness and farsightedness in the plan. It was a cluster village comprising 10 newly-constructed tin-shed houses on raised plinth with a sanitary latrine for each, four deep tube-wells, cattle and homestead garden under Sukur Sikdarer Dangi village in Faridpur Sadar Upazila (sub-district)

Farah Kabir, ActionAid Bangladesh’s Country Director Farah was speaking in a talk jointly organized by ActionAid and Expo 2015 in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on June 17. Participants discussed how to bring changes in the food production system in order to eradicate hunger and, in the process, promote women’s rights and protect the environment mitigating climate change impacts.

We have been doing development work in Bangladesh for the last 29 years and have achieved amazing feats. In last 10 years we carried out significant work in transforming national policies that affected millions of Bangladeshi citizens. Seven brief stories inside will portray how people themselves could struggle and change policies and why we need to be more closely engaged and work with them in transforming their lives… We believe this publication will inspire and show direction to others who are committed to the vision – “people challenging poverty and exclusion

Surely many people have heard the phrase ‘an eye for an eye’, but ‘a stare for a stare’? I do not think so. ‘The meaning of the principle, an eye for an eye, is that a person who has injured another person receives the same injury in compensation. The phrase… is a quotation from several passages of the Hebrew Bible.’ (ref. wikipedia) And according to yourdictionary.com, ‘Stare’ means a fixed gaze that is held for a lengthy amount of time’. So, does it demand to stare at the person who stares at you?

I play with FACTS, WORDS and IMAGES believing that ‘INFORMATION’ = ‘POWER’ and it’s my RIGHT. Happy International Women’s Day from far and away! Every time I met a person, she or he greeted me with utmost enthusiasm. It was a great experience for me to capture them and their greetings in whatever instrument I had with me at that time. Lucky me, that I caught those moments in my camcorder! These memories are precious to me. I will reminisce about these days when I am old. I have learned, during such travels and hangouts in the rural communities, that life is simple and it’s beautiful. A girl of standard IX taught me that I can live with a dream even knowing it doesn’t have a mere chance to be fulfilled… but the key is to have a gleaming eyes. I am sure that dream has kept her soul spirited! In rural, people have time and zeal to stop by for you and say ‘Hello’. The communities are different from you and us, and so is the language. But these were no barriers to welcome me in the group or to have a long and sweet conversation between us.

25 year-old Hashi Akhter tells us. She is a young professional working as a child space facilitator for more than two years in a local NGO -Bhumija Foundation. Bhumija, based in Tala of Satkhira, which falls under the Southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh, is one of the Local Rights Programme (LRP) partners of ActionAid Bangladesh (AAB). Last year in August I was in Tala where I met Hashi for the first time. As a member of Emergency – Fast Action Support Team (E-FAST) of AAB, I went there to get updates from our Bhumija Foundation colleagues about the recent flood situation and relief distribution process taken by AAB for the affected communities. Within a short period of time I became close to Hashi while she was saying,

On IWD in 2012, girls from Bangladesh’s rural areas state their vision! “What do you want to be?” could be the second common question you have answered at several points in life. I remember scratching my scalp last time my grandfather held me in his arms and asked me the same question. He is no more.