By Mahtab Haider and Nader Rahman, second place of UNDP’s storytelling contest.
In the past decade alone, Bangladesh has slashed its poverty by half, rapidly decreased family size by two-thirds, ensured that roughly 90 percent of its girl children are enrolled in schools and reduced child mortality by 60 percent – a development feat recognized by a United Nations award two years ago.
The story of Shyamola Begum, 43, is one personal example of this larger success in Bangladesh’s development landscape.
Shyamola says she understands why her husband left her. Under the pressures of crippling poverty, with too many mouths to feed, he left their one room shanty in the capital one morning and never came back, she explains.
“We came to this city looking for a better life but my husband Jamal struggled to find work and ended up pulling a cycle-rickshaw. When I got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, he wasn’t happy,” Shyamola says.
Less than a year later, Shyamola got pregnant again, with another girl. Soon after, Jamal left for work one day and never came back.
“For several weeks in my pregnant state, I frantically searched for him in hospitals and morgues but the people from the slum knew he had left me,” she says. “They told me to stop looking.”
Shyamola shares her fate with tens of thousands of other women, whose husbands, driven by poverty and lack of employment opportunities, abandon their partners every year.
But Shyamola’s story has a comparatively happier ending, and she has managed to turn her life around thanks to a partnership between UNDP and the United Kingdom’s Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction.
Three years ago, through this project, she was awarded an entrepreneur grant of Tk 2,500 (roughly US $30) earmarked for the extremely poor. She matched this money with the $30 she had managed to save working as household help and set up a small tea stall in the slum where she lives. In just two months, Shyamola’s profits exceeded her own investment.
“Until I became destitute, I had never imagined I could run a business, that I could do accounts, that I could be successful,” she says.
This particular success story is not the exception either. Over 55,000 families like Shyamola’s have received such grants over the past five years, with encouraging results. In many places, these men and women have started making monthly contributions to their own local savings groups, so that there is a source of a larger loan in cases of emergency.
Investing in Women
The Urban Partnership for Poverty Reduction does more than hand out seed money. It also provides apprenticeships and educational stipends that equip young men and women to acquire vocational skills they can use to earn a living. According to a review by the UK’s development agency, as a result of better opportunities for youth, school dropout rates in participating slums have declined. Meanwhile, the project’s work in helping 29 of these communities build infrastructure in their slums has seen 150,000 households gain improved access to sanitation and water.
The initiative has directly resulted in better healthcare, allowing the poor to dedicate more time to finding jobs or keeping the ones they already have.
“The Urban Partnership for Poverty Reduction is Bangladesh’s premiere urban sector development project, and has played a strong role in bringing urban poverty into the Government’s policy focus, while changing the lives of roughly three million urban poor for the better,” says Stefan Priesner, Country Director at UNDP Bangladesh.
Much of this success has been possible through investments in women’s education and the expansion of women’s opportunities in the economic sphere, as seen in the joint UNDP and UK programme, say experts.
“Investing in women yields dividends for the entire family, specifically for children’s education and nutrition,” Priesner says. “UNDP’s work in combating rural and urban poverty is proof of this.”
When a different UNDP programme started providing cash-for-work schemes for destitute and abandoned women in rural Bangladesh, school enrolment rates for participants’ children nearly doubled to more than 90 percent. As the country, once defined by rural poverty, wakes up to the fact that it now needs a strategy to address pockets of extreme poverty in its growing urban areas, UNDP’s pioneering satellite mapping is aiding a targeted approach by the Government.
“In Bangladesh’s current development trajectory, Shyamola’s story could very well cease to be an exception,” Priesner says. “With a national ethos that believes in making the most of challenging situations and few opportunities, we can expect many more socio-economic success stories from Bangladesh in the future.”
By Mahtab Haider, Communications Analyst at UNDP Bangladesh, and Nader Rahman, Communications Associate at UNDP Bangladesh.
Source: UNDP