Districts as of March 1996

Bangladesh:
Pioneering a Future of Self-Reliance

Across Bangladesh today, there is a growing phenomenon - a movement of men and women working together to create a future free from hunger.

They work strategically, applying principles and approaches that are a radical departure from the top-down, bureaucratic approaches to poverty alleviation that have dominated the past 50 years.

Breaking the mind-set of dependency: Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest nations and confronts frequent national disasters. A steady flow of foreign aid, while important, has left the nation with no widely shared vision of a future of self-reliance.

In 40 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, The Hunger Project has trained hundreds of volunteer "animators" to lead a Vision, Commitment, Action workshop. This workshop, delivered to more than 75,000 people to date, creates a new vision of a self-reliant future. In gives people the opportunity to commit to that vision and then mobilizes them to take simple, high-impact actions, including planting 400,000 trees, installing 6,000 sanitary latrines, installing 300 tube wells.

In 15 districts where our voluntary leadership is highly developed, we have adapted the hunger-free-zone strategy, systematically organizing villagers to build their own schools and health centers (including 120 adult education centers), construct their own irrigation embankments and form producer associations to ensure higher incomes.

In Dhaka, we work with key parliamentarians and government ministries. Two new partnerships with government have recently emerged: devlepoment of an intensive seven-day agricultural training program with the Ministry of Youth, and an initiative to strengthen many of Bangladesh’s 15,000 small-scale local associations, with the Social Welfare Ministry.

The first hunger-free-zone initiative in Bangladesh was declared by the people of Uttarda, Comilla District. Recognizing that the most important intervention for ending hunger is the education of girls, they created the People’s Initiative High School, which opened in January. Building on that success, they have constructed a health center. For increased incomes, people have formed self-help groups, and established fish farming, duck rearing, vegetable production and a tree nursery.

Rather than waiting for a government program to solve their problem of flood control, the 20,000 people in the hunger-free-zone area of Begum Ganj, Noakhali District, built their own embankments to protect 100 acres, enabling them to grow two and three crops a year instead of just one. The pride of ownership is so great that during a recent flood, villagers rousted themselves at 3 a.m. to reinforce the embankments. This process has now spread to nearby Gabua, where people have protected 450 acres, and Papua, where they have protected 400 acres.

Two hundred youth from hunger-free-zones were in the first class of a new, intensive seven-day training in poultry rearing and fish farming co-created by The Hunger Project and the Ministry of Youth. Previously, government training programs lasted three months and so were unavailable to many youth. Graduates of the course become eligible for start-up loans from the government.