A barefoot young man in rolled-up jeans clutches a laptop as he slogs through a narrow muddy aisle between rice fields on a drizzling late September afternoon. He’s rushing to help a farm couple who are facing trouble with their ducks in a coastal village in southern Bangladesh.
Nila Kispotta, a 19-year-old rural girl from the Oraon ethnic community, has become a figure of exceptional achievement to the small, poverty-stricken village in Thakurgaon in northwest Bangladesh that she grew up in. Born into a family of daily wage earners, Kispotta dreamt of a different life. So when she enrolled in tertiary education to pursue a diploma in Nursing Science and Midwifery — she achieved something her family and community hadn’t even dreamed was possible.
With nearly 5.5 million people people across Bangladesh affected by severe flooding -- the worst in two decades -- humanitarian experts are concerned that millions of people, already badly impacted by COVID-19, will be pushed further into poverty.
At 12, Mohammed* is an orphan. He watched his parents being killed by Myanmar government soldiers a year ago. And he is one of an estimated half a million Rohingya children who have survived and been witness to what the United Nations has called genocide.
Ferdous Begum was cleaning her child after he had defecated in the open, using leaves she collected from a nearby tree at Bangladesh’s Teknaf Nature Park. The settlement is packed with Rohingya refugees who fled military persecution in Myanmar since August.
Twelve-year-old Rubina still struggles with the horrors she witnessed in her homeland in Myanmar before fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh three months ago.
Forsaken and driven out by their home country Myanmar, tens of thousands of Rohingyas are struggling to survive in Bangladesh’s border districts amid scarcities of food, clean water and medical care, mostly for children and elderly people.
Aid agencies warn of a serious unfolding humanitarian crisis as floodwaters continue to inundate new areas of three South Asian countries, forcing millions of people to flee their homes for shelters.
At least 141 people (at the time of writing), including children and four army personnel, were killed in separate series of landslides triggered by heavy rains in Rangamati, Bandarban, and Chittagong on June 13, 2017. The losses have been monumental, and officials fear that the death toll may rise even further in the worst landslide since 2007, when a landslide resulted in the death of around 130 people and affected 1.5 million people in the region.
Bangladesh is weighing a World Bank proposal to introduce a carbon tax, the first of its kind in the South Asian nation, amid fears of a backlash from consumers.
Anxiety has yet to die down over a week after crowds of Muslims torched more than
a dozen temples and scores of houses in southeast Bangladesh, leaving thousands of Buddhists with the unshakeable premonition that more violence was forthcoming.
With a stunning landslide victory under her belt, prime minister-elect Sheikh Hasina Wajed has a second opportunity to put the ghosts of the past to rest and release Bangladesh from a cycle of crises that has plagued this country since its violent birth in 1971.