At the Berlin film festival earlier this year, I attended the screening of a documentary called Moddhikahne Char (Char: No Man’s Land) which tells the story of a young boy, Rubel, whose family lives on a char on the Padma river. The documentary heartbreakingly details the precarious lives of the char dwellers, their existence dependent on the mercy of unpredictable natural forces.
The people in Rubel’s village have very few options to earn an income and many of them take to smuggling rice and medicine across the border from India. They live in fear of the Indian border guards (BSF), a force just as unpredictable and no less cruel than the river.
At the end of the documentary we find that Rubel is forced to drop out of school so that he can work full-time to pay the dowry for his sister’s marriage. It was clear that, in spite of their courage and resilience, the future looked grim for Rubel and his fellow villagers on the char. By the time the movie ended, many in the audience were in tears.
As luck would have it, within the first month of my return to Bangladesh I was invited to accompany the head of the British Development Agency (DFID), Sarah Cook, to visit a large aid project funded by DFID/UK Aid and AusAid on the chars on the Jamuna river, in the northwestern part of Bangladesh. Needless to say I was eager to take up this opportunity to find out for myself whether the lives of the char dwellers here reflected what I saw in the documentary.
The drive out of Dhaka is a bumpy one, and within half an hour of leaving the perimeters of the city, one is presented with a very different picture of Bangladesh. The open spaces and fields are a welcome relief from the sardine-can density of Dhaka; however, the pot-hole filled roads and dilapidated infrastructure of the smaller cities really makes one question the ever-so-popular prediction of Bangladesh reaching middle-income status in the near future.
The main purpose of our visit is to meet the beneficiaries of the Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP), which has been running here since 2004. The programme is aimed towards the extreme poor living on the chars in order to help lift them out of poverty, which is defined as an income of less than Tk181 per person per day.
In addition to the basic income criteria, households need to meet some other parameters to qualify for CLP assistance. These include residency on the char for at least six months, no ownership or access to land, no productive assets worth more than Tk5,000, ownership of no more than two goats/sheep, or 10 fowl or one shared cow, not receiving cash or asset grants from another programme and having no regular source of income.
The typical beneficiary of the Chars Livelihoods Programme also has little or no access to services such as healthcare, education or microfinance. They are at risk of illness, floods, erosion and seasonal hunger known as monga.
After an overnight stay in Bogra, we made an early-morning start to our destination, a village named Chandanshwar on a char on the Jamuna river. As our speedboats made their way through the mud-coloured water, I couldn’t help but be struck by the desolate, melancholy beauty of the surroundings.
The main mode of transport to the char is through manually pulled wooden boats, which take considerably longer time than our motorised transport. This makes even the closest town, Gaibandha, with its very few modest amenities, difficult to access for most char dwellers.
Once we arrive at the char, the lush, open landscape is a stark contrast to the dilapidated cities we had travelled through on the way here. We are told that this char is a relatively stable one which has been in place for over 32 years, giving its inhabitants some measure of stability, a rare blessing in char living.
Since 2004, the CLP programme has been working here to raise houses on plinths above the flood level, providing access to clean water, sanitary latrines and health services, providing stipend payments and income-generating assets to households (usually livestock), trainings on skills such as gardening, financial management through village savings and loans groups and trainings on social issues, for example, child marriage.
One of the remarkable aspects of the CLP is that the principle beneficiaries are the women. The assets are given to the women, and women are the recipients of various trainings and skill-building activities. There are several reasons behind this.
First, most of the men are not around to participate in the programme since they leave the chars to find employment in the city or they work on the farms during the day. Second, there is an explicit goal of empowering women since it is thought to be the best way to have an impact on increasing the nutrition and health goals and sustainably lifting income levels of the families.
Our interactions with the villagers quickly make it apparent that these initiatives aimed towards women have made a difference. Our first stop is a meeting of a social development group being held in a narrow tin-roofed shed next to patches of vegetable gardens. About 20 women are gathered there, some with babies in their arms. The topic of the meeting is discrimination against the disabled.
When asked what they have learned from the course, the women are quick to volunteer and put on an impromptu sketch about how the disabled ought to be treated. Their wit and sense of humour shines through even in such a short demonstration, and they clearly enjoy and take pride in participating in the training programme.
Afterwards we ask them about how and whether their lives have changed since participating in the CLP programme. Several women share their stories eagerly. They speak about how receiving the assets helped them to leave work as hired household help and generate their own income.
They spoke about how they are now able to eat two to three meals a day instead of one. Many of them speak about sending their children to school for the first time, and surprisingly, a few mothers speak with a lot of pride about their daughters and their achievements in school.
We move on from the social development group to visit some of the homes of the CLP beneficiaries. On the way the team leader of the programme, Dr Malcolm Marks, describes to us the impressive range of activities that are being undertaken to ensure that people who receive CLP assistance are able to be self-sufficient and keep themselves out of poverty in the long run.
These include partnering up with private sector firms such as Danone and Bengal Meat who purchase milk and meat from the char residents; building the capacity of the residents to use these types of opportunities; building financial capacities of the village women, including the use of mobile banking, such as Bkash, so that they can easily receive money from their husbands who work in the cities; and working with local government to allocate khas land (state-owned land) on the char to the poor.
We arrive at a cluster of houses owned by beneficiaries from the first stage of the CLP project. The women proudly show off their homes, cows and small patches of gardens. One of the better-off houses has even a solar energy panel mounted on the roof. The accommodations are fairly modest, but the joy on the faces of these women speaks to how far they have come to achieve this.
By this point of our tour we have picked up a small entourage of village children. As I raise my camera to take pictures, most of them turn away with a shy smile, except for one young girl in her nicely pressed school uniform. Unlike the other children, she stares intently at the camera lens, refusing to be intimidated by this paltry machine.
Our last stop is a meeting of the village savings and loan (VSL) group. Despite the apparent ubiquity of microfinance institutions in Bangladesh, the majority of char participants are unable to access credit, and during crises often resort to taking high-interest loans from informal money-lenders. The VSL offers the poorest with access to credit and also a safe place to save for the future.
The VSL meeting was a fascinating display of the bond of trust between the village women. All the women in the group knew by heart how much money was in the till and how much was owed by whom. They also vouched for each other about the legitimacy of their needs when someone needed to take out a loan.
Due to its popularity, the VSL is open to all women in the village, not only those who qualify for the CLP programme. It is clear that in addition to meeting their immediate needs, participation in the VSL builds much-needed financial skills among the women, which can have a huge long-term impact on their economic futures.
On the way back from the char I ask DFID head Sarah Cook about her impression of the programme and the people of the char. She speaks about being enormously impressed by how with a small amount of help people can lift themselves out of poverty. But most of all, she said that she was touched by the confidence of the women and their sense of optimism and hope.
I couldn’t help but agree. It is a known fact that Bangladesh still struggles with the issue of gender equality, and women are significantly disadvantaged when it comes to education and access to economic resources. In fact, this brought to mind one of the questions that one of our colleagues from DFID, who was acting as the interlocutor between us and the villagers, kept asking the various groups of women: “Do your husbands beat you?”
Thankfully, the answer, seemingly given in good faith, was never “yes.” However, the necessity of asking the question showed that this was a reality in not too distant a past for many of these women. Under these circumstances, programmes such as the CLP that specifically aim to socially and economically empower women can make a powerful dent in the lopsided power dynamics between men and women in the long run.
On the drive back to Dhaka I was thinking about Rubel and how different my experience on the char was compared to what I had expected. Then I remembered the young girl with her perfectly pressed school uniform and fearless look, clutching her textbooks close to her heart.
I wonder what I would find if I returned a few years later. Would she go on to study at a university? Grow up to be a journalist, a doctor or a lawyer? Perhaps a community leader or a politician? Considering what her mother, aunts and older sisters have accomplished already, nothing seems impossible.
