Shine Bhaskaran: I am happy to acknowledge that the various projects that our national presidents are currently engaged in are all in one way or another closely connected to sustainable growth and development for the chosen community. I also appreciate the fact that Bangladesh is actively participating in assisting in the development of local organisations and communities.
The current project involves education regarding clean drinking water and tree plantation, and providing stipend for students. JCI is presently focusing on need analysis on the community level. When the need has been analysed the root cause will reveal itself. Only then can JCI members hope to create sustainable change in the community, because uncovering the root cause and addressing it effectively is the only sustainable way to dealing with such challenges.
When it comes to challenges like ensuring clean drinking water, the solution won’t magically appear in an instant, it will emerge taking its due time, but when it does it will clearly mean more prosperity in that community since less people are falling ill. This year our theme is “Unite to Impact.”
Do you think Bangladesh has need for diversified strategies to address challenges?
JCI’s mission is to provide opportunities that empower young people to create positive change. We will make sure our youngsters are empowered, and provide them with opportunities to grow in confidence; these are in turn utilised to make positive changes. That’s the mission we are following all over the world in our 120 branches. In trying to bring about positive change we encourage our members to study the real need of the community. The challenge faced by Dhaka will not be the challenge faced by a nearby village, so we should give need analysis its due urgency in the community. Secondly, what’s the real challenge, and how can we get to the bottom of it? We need to think along the lines of “Why is the problem occuring?” That will give us a list of challenges that we need to address. We have to treat the root cause, and diversified action has to be taken according to the varying needs of the various areas.
Have you come across anything that sets Bangladesh apart in terms of challenges we face; a challenge that is unique to us alone?
I will be able to provide an answer with more certainty in the near future; this is one of the main reasons why I am here, in order to understand the country better. But right now given the statistics that I have come across already I must say that magnitude of annual maternity death in your country stands out to the point of alarm. A close second would be the infant mortality rate.
Could you tell us about a few short term goals and a long term one from the perspective of JCI regarding the communities?
Our structure is something like this: we have a local organisation, which is supported by an international organisation. As a rule, local organisations have a short term plan of action spanning one year while strategic plans are more long term spanning five years. The current focus of strategic planning has shifted from numbers to impact. In other words, it has stopped being all about how many communities have been activated, and instead it is all about what sustainable impact the activation has had on the community in question. In a nutshell, the short term plan is to bring the government, the private sector and social development institutions under one coordinated umbrella so that projects have next to no gaps in the chain of contributing factors leading up to sustainable impact. When we have these three crucial bodies moving in tandem, only then will we see results with any amount of impact, only then can we realistically move forward toward becoming a nation that is empowered through true and deep introspection followed by insightful actions.
