Amiyo Rani
Protirodh
Amiyo Rani has overcome incredible adversity to become a strong female leader in her community.
Amiyo is from Sultanpur village in Bochganj Upazilla, Dinajpur. Married while very young, she soon became the victim of domestic violence and did not have a place to seek refuge in. A few years later her husband married again and this cycle of violence continued and worsened further. But this time, she decided to seek justice for her vulnerable condition and contacted the Union Chairman who called a shalish. However her husband did not attend.
Walking back home she passed a group of singers on the roadside. These songs reminded her of her situation, a woman at the mercy of unreasonable and horrifying abuse.
The group of singers was from Protirodh, a project of CARE Bangladesh, who with the support of local organisations highlight the issues of violence against women through folk songs. The group suggested that she join a CARE EKATA (Empowerment, Knowledge and Transformative Action) group. EKATA groups are comprised of around twenty women and ten adolescent girls, meeting thrice a week to discuss women's rights issues, receiving numeracy and literacy training, identifying local problems to solve through Community Action Plans, and becoming involved in local governance groups.
Through her participation she gained the strength to speak up about the injustice she faced. Amiyo was provided with information on how to pursue her legal rights and was protected from her husband's abuse who was sentenced to jail as a result of these efforts. In addition, she was provided with financial compensation and a section of his land where she built her home.
With assistance from CARE she received financial support that allowed her to open a tailoring shop so that she could be financially independent. Through this independent livelihood she is able to provide for her family without reliance on her former husband, breaking the cycle of violence and dependency. Through this business she also provides free tailoring training to other women.
She continues to attend EKATA groups as a mentor where she can give women advice. She speaks with them about how household work can be shared and how gender roles can be changed.
With perseverance, Amiyo was able to overcome the injustice she faced to become a strong mother and role model in the community. Her strength to stand against this injustice has led to not only positive outcomes for her family but for her community as well.
Amiyo's story highlights the struggles of many other women in Bangladesh and works as a source of inspiration about how such adversities can be overcome.
Compiled by Star Correspondent
Community Action
Amongst the myriad of action-driven organisations in the country, CommunityAction stands out as a philosophy-driven training organisation for students.
CommunityAction is a student-run registered social service organisation. Since its inception in December 2008, the volunteers, called Actioneers, have attracted widespread attention through their unique mantra: “Actioneers are greater than Actions” There are now almost 600 Actioneers, from diverse backgrounds, who work relentlessly to bring about short and long-term changes to the lives of disadvantaged people in Dhaka, Sylhet and Chitagong.
“At CA, we focus primarily on training our Actioneers to be -moral, influential and professional. These are our vision, mission and value respectively. We aim to mould the Actioneers as assets for Bangladesh and the world,” says Nabila Idris, the Founding President of the organisation. “The way we train them in these qualities is by facilitating their involvement in social service. Also, we supplement this hands-on training through regular workshops on various subjects, starting from financial management and going all the way to social media. Actioneers do social work in a planned manner, with discipline and cultural sensitivity. Thus, the social service is not the end, it is the means to the end,” she explains.
CA's motto is: 'Even a smile is charity'. They have a wide range of successful Actions, some key examples are: building over 80 tube wells impacting around 66,000 people, distributing over 30,000 pieces of clothes amongst the needy, providing meals to over 15,000 street people and doing pioneering work with the visually-impaires in fact, Actioneers are building Bangladesh's first text-book based library for the visually-impaired. They have also promoted pioneering concepts in volunteerism, like the “Shebar maddhome bijoyer prokash” campaign (Celebrating Victory Through Volunteerism) where over a 100 national/international organisations participated in celebrating Victory Day through volunteering for the underprivileged.
A Watson fellow visiting Bangladesh remarked about CommunityAction, “I have been so touched by every single individual CA introduced me to. It is an incredible organisation. I truly deeply respect you guys.”
Recently, the organisation has been developing its research wing , with each department (including even the human resources and the social media wings) producing yearly papers with insight into their work. When asked where she sees CA in the future, Nabila comments, “CommunityAction should be the training ground for the thinking young minds in our community so they can form the basis of an enlightened and patriotic civil society.”
by Sushmita S. Preetha
Drishtipat Writers' Collective
Thought Leadership
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Investment banker.Physician. Artist/activist.Tech innovator.Economists. Bloggers. Academics in different fields. Feminists. Child rights activists. Development practitioners. Mountaineer. Scattered all over the world, working, living separate lives.
But two things connected them at the core all things Bangladesh and the passion for writing.
The Drishtipat Writers' Collective was formed in 2007 as an extension of the popular Bangladesh based English blog Unheard Voice (www.unheardvoice.net/blog). The core founders of the diaspora human rights organization Drishtipat created the blog in 2005 as a space for free speech and thoughts and a way to break the probashi/swadeshi divide. At times of national emergencies, such as the lead up to 1/11, or the 2008 election, or the BDR mutiny, Unheard Voice was the blog for analyses at real time. Beyond national politics, UV has been the place to raise issues of social justice, minority rights and economic empowerment.
By 2007, UV bloggers began to compose better-researched, peer-edited and constructive critical articles based on blog reactions and actions on different topics. And so formed the Drishtipat Writers' Collective, a group of writers from various professional and academic backgrounds and interests. While the Collective primarily writes for Bangladeshi English media (both print and online), members also write for international magazines and publications, raising issues of human rights, national politics, foreign affairs, violence against women and children, economics, social trends and popular culture.
English writing and readership remains a challenge in Bangladesh which is detrimental to our position in the global economy. The Collective, while criticised from time to time for writing primarily in English and losing out on domestic readers, has however reached far and wide due to the virtue of writing in the global language. These well researched pieces have made their way to policymakers' desks, international websites, and raised interest in English reading by Bangladeshis. Many of our national stories that require international attention either for further scrutiny or as global best practices, do not reach a wide audience because of language barriers. In a globalised world where English is the medium of exchange, DWC writers aim to tell our stories of both challenges and successes for the world to see, experience, act, react.
A Post Script: The Drishtipat Writers' Collective experienced a great loss with the unexpected demise of Dr. Jalal Alamgir, a friend, a rising academic star, a real though conscious writer, a comrade in the Collective. The Collective continues to feel incomplete without Jalal.
by Shahana Siddiqui