NEW

On 15th February 2007 Unnayan Onneshan has organized a workshop titled Enhancing the Livelihoods of the Rural Poor: the Role of Information and Communication Technologies held in Dhaka. Experts from different government organizations, NGOs and donor agencies had participated in the workshop. Iqbal Ahmed and Erin C Lentz of Unnayan Onneshan presented the keynote paper. All participants agreed on the need of information and knowledge for development of rural livelihoods and empowerment of rural people. However, limited resources and illiteracy are impeding rural people benefiting from the ICT facilities. The major issues should be resolved very quickly was identified that given the limited resources all organization should take a integrated approach to avoid overlapping of the ICT projects and content generation; technology should be localized and contents should include local information using local language; there is a huge amount of information in the hand of the government agencies and the information should be digitized and easily disseminated to the local people. Government should give permission to establish local community radio stations because it is one of the very effective ways to provide information to the local people. The presentation session followed by group discussions and concluded with adopting the policy recommendations set by the participants.

Full Report on Enhancing the Livelihoods of the Rural Poor: the Role of Information and Communication Technologies will be available on this site on end of April.

Water-logging is an ever- threat that is fast gaining in intensity in this southwest Coastal region. Millions of people especially poor & landless farmers, share-croppers, agricultural wage labourers, petty traders and others lost their livelihoods security. Water logging rotted the roots of trees, and salinity killed off all vegetation, fruit trees died off, agriculture was drastically reduced and even homesteads vegetation and cattle rearing become impossible. Most of the rivers have dried up. This is a case of complete human disaster. But who cares?  Details

Unnayan Onneshan participated in the World Social Forum (WSF) held in Nairobi, Kenya from 20-25 January 2007. Almost all the publication materials of Unnayan Onneshan were displayed in the Forum. List of publications were distributed to interested organizations working in different continents. On behalf of Unnayan Onneshan, Monower Mostafa had several occasions having both formal and informal meeting with representatives with different international partners.

• AEJB News
  
  • Monower Mostafa, coordinator of Alliance for Economic Justice, Bangladesh (AEJB) participated in World Social Forum (WSF) held in Nairobi, Kenya from 20-25 January 2007. He took part in a discussion session on “Foreign investment: Profit and repatriation” organized by Campaign for Good-governance- SUPRO.
  
  • AEJB Core Group Meeting was held on the 1st of February 2007 at Unnayan Onneshan office. Some important decisions were taken to furthering the AEJB activities involving more and more youth groups in the movement.
  
  • AEJB organized a discussion on “Political ecology of forest erosion in Madhupur Sal forest” on the 6th of February at Unnayan Onneshan. Dr. Tawhudul Islam, assistant Professor of Geography, Jahangirnagar University presented a power-point presentation and representatives from different organizations took part in the discussion.