The New Nation - Internet Edition

Shakhawat Hossain

Friendship

In 1994, Yves Marre sailed a surplus river barge all the way from France and, thanks to the sponsorship of Unilever, transformed it here into a hospital boat, which then became the centre of operations for the NGO “Friendship” run by Mrs Runa Khan-Marre, wife of Yves who is still the technical consultant of the association.

Friendship has more than one goal:

First and foremost, it caters to health, with over 200 000 patients in the “Char” Islands, (shifting islands) of the upper Jamuna since the inauguration of the floating hospital, in March 2002, by the then President HE Badruddjoda Chowdhury until December 2005. NGOs from France, the Netherlands and Sweden regularly send highly specialised teams of doctors and surgeons who come for free to perform “miraculous” operations for those populations without access to basic health services. With the help of « Emirates Airline Foundation », Friendship is now building a new two-hulled hospital-ship.

Education: Friendship has just finished ten new schools within a pilot project. The NGO built the school, selects and trains teachers chosen from the community and puts together a learning program specially adapted to children in the Chars.

Development: Friendship takes advantage of its unique knowledge of the area to counsel and help inhabitants to better their economy and find new ways to protect houses from floods.

Emergency help: after the 2004 floods, Friendship, with the sponsorship of the French “Carrefour”, has distributed over 600.000 food rations and, with the financial help of the French Government, has rebuilt 600 houses, dug wells and installed latrines. Friendship also helps victims of industrial accidents in the garment sector.

Culture : Friendship is involved in the preservation of one of the oldest crafts of Bengal, which it chooses to regard as part of the world heritage: the naval construction of traditional boats. Friendship has called together the last generation of naval carpenters, blacksmiths, bamboo workers and rope-makers. With them, it is in the process of renovating or building anew around ten full-sized traditional wooden boats ; the team has also be trained in making scale models of those boats and number of exhibition have already been organised, including with the National Museum of Dhaka. The ultimate aim is the creation of a life-sized boat museum, which should open around the beginning of 2007.

Partners Bangladesh

Street Children’s PARTNERS-BGD

Maer Achole Shelter

PARTNERS is an international solidarity organisation created in France in 1991 by Christian Raymond, an engineer and diplomat. Partners’ volunteers conduct development projects in poor areas, which get little assistance from large international organisations. They work in close conjunction with the local population, whose involvement in designing and implementing the program is of paramount importance.

Particular emphasis is placed on health, education, and training, essentially for the benefit of women and children. PARTNERS’ main objective is sustainability and thus aims to leave the communities concerned in charge in the long term.

PARTNERS has had projects in Nigeria, Brazil and India and is currently active mainly in Myanmar, Bolivia, Moldova and of course, in Bangladesh.

In November 2001 the Street Children day/night shelter in Dhaka opened. The name of the shelter is “Maer Achole” after the place in a mother’s sari where children can find traditionally consolation and security.

The objectives of this project are the rehabilitation, socialisation and reinsertion of street children, enabling them to contribute to their country’s development.

The centre is accommodating up to 100 children, pursuing a policy of gender equity. Experience has shown that the children, if given a chance, can leave the streets and make a fresh start. A team of 9 people: educators, teachers, a physiologist, a doctor, a paramedical, and residential caretakers are working daily with the children. A social worker visits them in their favourite 'hangouts’ and working places, and encourages them to come to the shelter.

The outcome expected is to break the vicious circle of poverty, and to raise the street children’s socio-economic condition, with enhanced dignity. This capacity building shall allow them to live on their own, with real access to resources, and to reduce their involvement in hazardous jobs. It appears to be fundamental to restore the confidence of the children, both in them-selves and enable them to trust in adults.

Handicap International

Handicap International is a non-government Organisation established in 1982 and now present in more than 50 countries.

Its main focus is supporting and helping the disabled and vulnerable groups in developing countries, in order to help them recover their capacities of action and also to improve their livings conditions, through a better participation in the society.

Handicap International started its action in Bangladesh in 1997, having in mind how to make an impact to help the integration of the disabled people in the society by upholding up their rights in every domain of life.

More than 5.6 % of the population of Bangladesh suffer from a handicap, which represents between of individuals. These persons and their families are most of the time excluded from the society. Women and children are the most fragile towards the exclusion.

Unawareness, negative perception, limited access even impossible of the public services as well as private exclude these disabled people from the realms of decision and participation in the social, cultural, economic life.

Handicap International and their national partners works towards the government of Bangladesh to promote and establish rights of the disabled people, construction of institutional capacities to able the instruction of basic services in the domain of health and re-education.

The prevention, re-education and insertion are the key words of the action of Handicap International, based more and more on “rights”.

The domain of action by Handicap International in Bangladesh are the following:

Awareness campaign on the rights of disabled people

Integration of disabled people in all domain of development

Development and improvement of the quality of specialised services

Capacity building of key service providers and policy makers to create equal opportunities for the full participation of people with disability

Disaster management

Work in progress on “mental handicap” in order to develop activities in this domain, often neglected.

Aide Médicale et Développement / Kinésithérapeutes Du Monde

In the coastal area of Cox’s Bazaar (South East of Bangladesh), thousands of children are suffering from important deformations of the lower limbs due to a severe form of rickets, whose cause is still not well known. Surveys have shown that it is a kind of multifactorial rickets without vitamin deficiency.

This new disease appeared about 30 years ago and affects, now, 5 to 10 % of the children. A number of them suffer from such severe deformations that they are unable to walk and are definitively condemned to disability.

This form of rickets is mainly found in this area of Bangladesh although similar cases have been observed in other countries such as South Africa, Nigeria or Ethiopia.

Aide Médicale et Développement (AMD), Kinésithérapeutes Du Monde (KDM), and Shahidul Association (three French associations) have decided to fight in favour of these children. Since 2001, they have been leading a programme in Cox’s Bazaar District in partnership with the local NGO Social Assistance and Rehabilitation for the Physically Vulnerable (SARPV) which is very involved in this issue. SARPV were the first to discover an important number of disabled children in the Chakaria area (Cox’s Bazaar District).

The Straight Leg Project aims at providing a long-term solution to prevent this rare form of rickets and at taking in charge these disabled children especially those suffering from rickets.

Our action is focused on the research of the real causes of rickets, the prevention (nutritional counselling), and a medical and surgical treatment of the children suffering from disabilities. To make this possible we have set up a disability centre which will be run by SARPV in the years to come.

French Association SOLINFO

The SOLINFO association, which stands for the “informatique solidarity”, was started in summer of 2002 by a small group of people who had no experience in the domain of humanitarian aid. It started with an unoriginal idea which is to reuse of used computers. It is a non-political NGO, aimed at promoting and teaching computing to underprivileged people in foreign countries by teaching, of course, but also by providing equipment for schools, hospitals, even NGOs or local administrations if the use is in the same idea of the association. The association has chosen to manage micro-projects. A simple computer is a fabulous tool for learning as a service to the school children, students of course, but also the ill, the handicapped and many more. SOLINFO can play a part in various domains: - providing computing and ancillary equipment, - introduction to the use of microcomputer; - providing of pedagogical aids (software or books); - follow up and assistance on a long term and others

Financed by civil and business donations, SOLINFO does not have the vocation to establish itself in a region on long-terms. Each travel has a goal of, of course: achieving what has been planned, but also researching ideas for the following projects. The absence of a permanent office allows for more flexibility and adaptability as well as for economical reasons

The Bangladeshi projects

In 2004, SOLINFO decided to work in Bangladesh. In October , a first mission to estimate the situation allowed to confirm this choice. Already, SOLINFO Worked with differents NGO as French association PARTNERS or AEWA. In 2005, we will realise several projects in aid of, by example, WELFARE ASSOCIATION FOR DISAVANTADGED CHILDREN (orphanages and mentally retarded children) in Dacca and Chittagong or ASSOCIATION FOR REALISATION OF BASIC NEEDS (schools in slums of Dacca).

French Support Committee to GK-Savar

(Comité Français de Soutien à GK-Savar)

The French Support Committee to GK-Savar (FSC) is supporting the Bangladeshi NGO Gonoshasthaya Kendra, GK ( website: http://www.gkbd.org/) since 1972. In Bangla, Gono means People, Shastaya means Health and Kendra means Center. GK’s roots are to be found in the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, when a bamboo-built field hospital was established near the eastern border to take care of refugees and wounded « freedo

m fighters ». After independence, the founders, among them Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury who is till now the GK coordinator, decided to begin a new « war » against poverty, hunger and diseases striking mostly rural areas landless and poor farmers. His team undertook a rural health programme in Savar, 40 km NW of Dhaka. GK recruited and trained many health workers (paramedics), most of them women, to become intermediates between patients and doctors.

GK widened its action to education, creating primary schools, professional schools, and a university (medicine, health sciences); to women’s advancement; to pharmaceuticals production, to relief operations after natural disasters; to rural and small industries development. Today, GK’s staff is over 2500 people, including 40 doctors and 300 paramedics, attending more than 1,000,000 people in rural and urban areas through ten centers scattered all over Bangladesh.

Actions of the French Support Committee to GK-Savar As soon as 1972, a support committee to GK was established in France, as a member of Abbé Pierre’s UCOJUCO (Twinning committees union). When the aims of the twinning operations were no more oriented towards the poorest, UCOJUCO stopped its activities in Bangladesh, while the French support committee (FSC) maintained its support to GK programmes. FSC and its hundreds of donors were convinced that nobody knows better how to choose and to implement the best solutions for Bangladesh than the Bangladeshis themselves. FSC supported projects are defined and proposed by GK with people’s active participation. Since 1972, FSC has raised more than 2,000,000 euros (2006 value) not including 2,500,000 euros from different cofinancings (European Union, Emmaüs International, British NGOs t). Many different programmes have been funded such as: supply of drugs, vaccines, medical and surgical equipments; support to credit co-operatives (1976); building of multipurpose cyclone shelters; rehabilitation after May 1991 cyclone in Cox’s Bazar region; support to primary schools (since 1981); etc.

In 2006, FSC is involved in several programmes such as: food supply for tribal school children and parents in the Tanchi area (Bandarban); cultural exchange with French schools and food supply in a Mahato school near Tarash; arsenic-free dugwells; support of a driving school for women in Cox’s Bazar.

FSC tries to publicize widely GK’s works amongst its donors, French medias and public, especially through activity reports edited twice a year.

Every year some FSC Board members and donors visit GK at their own expenses, in order to evaluate progresses in the supported programmes and to keep alive the friendly links established more than 30 years ago with GK workers.

A New French NGO in Bangladesh.

Action contre la Faim, or ACF, (Action against hunger) is an important French ONG, active in many countries. Following the last floods, they have decided to open a permanent branch in Bangladesh.

The Humanitarian Wing of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs has granted ACF a 79,000€ subsidy to help them start their operations in Bangladesh.

By Shakhawat Hossain, Attaché de Presse,

Embassy of France