After losing everything in the recent devastating flood that swept the northeastern districts in Bangladesh, pregnant mother Joynaba Akter, her three children and her husband took refuge in a shelter centre at Gowainghat in Sylhet.
When the Bangladesh Forest Department felled Basanti Rema’s banana orchard, Rema, a Garo indigenous forest-dweller of Madhupur Forest, felt she was living a nightmare.
Rema, from Pegmari village in Madhupur, Tangail district, had cultivated the banana plants on half an acre in the Madhupur Forest. But the Forest Department claimed that the land on which the bananas were cultivated belonged to the department.
Rani Akter, a mother of five, usually works as a domestic helper in Dhaka’s Zikatola area. When the coronavirus pandemic broke out in Bangladesh last March, her employers asked her not to come to their homes for fear of infection.
“I lost my work in three houses one after the other, which became a nightmare for me. My rich employers did not allow me in their homes as they thought that I might carry the invisible virus,” Akter told IPS.
Kajol Miah is a rice farmer from the Bangladesh side of the Meghna River Basin. And in towns on the Indian side of the river basin, Bangladeshi rice is in great demand.
The construction of a five-star hotel in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, could lead to the forced eviction of the Mro indigenous community from their ancestral lands and destroy “the social, economic, traditional and cultural fabric of the community”, warns Amnesty International.
But local activist Reng Young Mro told IPS that the international community must rally behind the Mro indigenous community to halt the construction.
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.
Amid the social distancing measures posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, coastal communities in Bangladesh and India face a double threat as the record-breaking Cyclone Amphan made landfall yesterday (May 20).
Nearly seven years ago, garment workers in Bangladesh were victims of one of the gravest man-made disasters in history -- a factory collapse that left more than 1,100 workers dead, and rendered thousands with injuries -- in many cases lifelong ones.
For many of the workers from Rana Plaza, the trauma remains real even to this day.
It was almost a decade ago when Ruma Begum and her family left their home in Bangladesh’s coastal Tazumuddin upazila or sub-district and travelled some 50 km away to start a new life. They had been driven out of their home by an extreme and changing climate that has continued to ravage the district of Bhola.
Israfil Boyati lives along the shoreline of the Bay of Bengal. In the past he used to catch fish in the canals and rivers of Bangladesh’s Sundarbans mangrove forest — one of the world’s largest and habitat to many endangered species, including the Bengal tigers and freshwater dolphins.
After his father passed away two years ago, the burden of caring for a six-member family rested on the shoulders of the now 19-year-old Farhad Hossain. He had no clue how he would support his family and pay for the education of his four younger siblings.
Rather than waiting for adults to act, more young girls and boys are standing up and speaking out on the world’s pressing issues.
For too long, women and girls have been excluded from the playing field—literally. But now, many are paving the way in the fight against gender inequality through sports.
As menstruation continues to be shamed in many communities, one organisation is rising up to the challenge to ensure “safe menstruation for all women of Bangladesh.”
(UNB/IPS) - Bangladesh is collecting data on international transactions of multinational companies to stop them from siphoning off money from the country.
It was the first time in the history of parliamentary elections in Bangladesh that a party won with such a huge margin. But according to local analysts familiar with Bangladesh's political climate, the victory by the ruling Awami League (AL) led coalition—which won over 96 percents of seats in parliament in the country's 11th national elections on Dec. 30—was expected in the face of the country's unprecedented development.
It has been six and half years since the killing of Bangladeshi journalists Meherun Runi and Sagar Sarwar in Dhaka. Runi, a senior reporter from the private TV channel ATN Bangla, and her husband Sarwar, news editor from Maasranga TV, were hacked to death at their home on Feb. 11, 2012.
On the face of it, the
2017 Global Findex shows that Bangladesh has made great strides toward financial inclusion since the previous Findex was released in 2014.
Toxic chemical pollution in the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world, is threatening thousands of marine and forest species and has environmentalists deeply concerned about the future of this World Heritage Site.