Dhaka 2008

That's all

2008-09-17T21:57:00.003+01:00

I got back from Bangladesh about 6 weeks ago. I got more or less everything I wanted, despite two weeks of tooth-gnashing sickness at the end.

So that's it for this blog for now... thanks to the 1000 or so people who apparently stumbled across this site before realising it had no relevance to them, and especially to the few who left comments.

Since coming back I have made a presentation (1.5Mb) and short paper on my preliminary findings for the BAICE Conference. Enjoy!

p.s. I will probably continue occasionally to bookmark news stories and other links about Bangladesh that interest me.

Education for sale

2008-07-02T10:06:00.001+01:00

Signs mostly found around the well-off Dhanmondi, Gulshan and Bonani parts of town.

Sundarbans

2008-06-16T15:16:00.005+01:00

Having not had a holiday for several days, it was time to head to the Sundarbans, the mangrove forest on the south coast, for a three day boat trip. The emphasis was very much on sitting on the boat, being fed constantly. Disappointingly there were no tiger attacks.

Workwise the data has all come in and I'm checking it for inconsistencies. There are lots. Trying to plan a quick set of interviews in small slums, which may have different characteristics to the very large slums where the survey was done. Still thinking about the camera idea.

Nepal

2008-05-31T12:51:00.002+01:00

Once again showing my commitment to my work, I clear off for a holiday in Nepal.

Cycled up to Nagarkot, 35km outside of Kathmandu. The last 10km were quite hardgoing.

More photos...

Kathmandu is such a holiday after Dhaka. Everything is so much easier (climate, hassle, transport). Coming back was difficult.

Kenya photography: 'It gives them a voice' (Guardian)

2008-05-30T12:12:00.002+01:00

Interesting idea ... give cameras to kids in slums.

My qualitative data so far is not providing the depth I would have liked. Wondering whether some photography could help.

Slum clearance

2008-05-30T12:05:00.002+01:00

On my way to work saw this small slum area being demolished. The people living there were told that morning that their homes were going to be demolished at midday.

Later that day most of the materials were being salvaged by anyone with a rickshaw-cart.

A few slums in the Mohakali area seem to have been cleared lately. I'm not sure if it's part of a larger programme of clearances. Either way it doesn't seem to have made local newspapers.

Aparajeyo Children's Day

2008-05-15T08:48:00.002+01:00

As mentioned earlier, Aparajeyo has a children's day once a month where the children get to take over the school.

The manager at his desk

The manager and headmaster. It was older children who had graduated from Aparajeyo and were attending a private secondary school, rather than the project's current students, who were put in charge. Fitting in with the secondary school's two-shift system, boys took over Aparajeyo in the morning while the girls were at school, and the girls were apparently going to come and take over in the afternoon. They were still using lesson plans prepared by the adult teachers. Nevertheless both the students and the teenage teachers seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Having seen the school we visited the slum, Sujat Nagar, from which about 75 of the children at Aparajeyo come. It was accessed via a shaky, patched-up bamboo bridge. My first thought was how pretty the place was, at least from this side of the bridge.

Water and cooking facilities.

Members of the slum action committee. The committee apparently comprised 4 men and 3 women although the women were not around when we visited. They told us the main thing this area needs is daycare centres for young children.

An NGO-provided health service.

Education provision for the several thousand children living in this slum is extremely limited. Apart from the 75 attending Aparajeyo, 20-30 go to a BRAC classroom, and perhaps a further 30 or so go to a Proshika education centre. The nearest government school is 2-3 km away, and is likely to be difficult for the children here to access.

Streetwise project, Badda

2008-05-12T10:15:00.000+01:00

My colleague Layli and I were invited to teach a couple of English classes. These were the best behaved children I have ever come across. Apparently this is because they have a lot of stimulation from various volunteers who come in and also receive breakfast and lunch at the centre.

Layli aggressively teaching colour words - 'This is BLUE!'

Kishoreganj

2008-04-27T09:19:00.001+01:00

Last weekend went to Kishoreganj, a district a few hours away from Dhaka.

Dhaka's amazingly empty train station - most people seem to prefer buses.

The train was a bit cockroachy but otherwise fine.

BRAC school spotting has become my hobby - this one was between Kishoreganj town and an outlying village.

In the evening we went to a fair featuring a genuinely frightening "Game of Danger" -- a motorbike demonstrating the laws of physics in a shakily built circular wooden structure.

Slum myths

2008-04-22T11:28:00.004+01:00

These are some of the things people come out with about slums which, as far as I can see so far, seem not to be true...

Everyone is equally poor in slums - There is enormous variation both between slums in Dhaka, and within each slum. Some people own several dwellings in the slum and rent them out to others. Others have family members sending money from abroad. These people still live in fairly bad conditions but their children's prospects must be much better. Karail Bosti, which seems to be seen by some people here as the city's teeming, flooded heart of darkness, has been described by others as the 'creme de la creme' of Dhaka slums, with better living conditions and richer inhabitants than some of the less well-known slums.
Slums are mainly peripheral - some writers on Dhaka slums seem to have the impression that, following evictions of many central Dhaka slums, slum dwellers have moved out to the periphery. In fact there remain several very large slums in the middle of the city, and anyway it is hard to tell what constitutes the centre. Areas like Mohammadpur (for example) seem pretty central to me, and although Mirpur is more suburban it's still very much part of the same urban sprawl.
Slum-dwellers are all migrants from rural areas - This is only true if you include as 'migrants' people whose parents or grandparents migrated. Most of the school-age children in the slums seem to have been born there. While there is likely to be some movement between different slums and between slums and villages, many people seem to have settled for the long term, eviction threats notwithstanding.

I also suspect the following to be myths - hope the survey will shed some light:

People in slums don't expect much for their children, or don't know what to expect - I reckon most people will have quite realistic expectations about the range of possible futures that their children could have, and will have a keen eye on 'escape routes' out of poverty and the slum.
People in slums don't send their children to private schools - There appear to be people paying substantial fees to send children to private schools both inside and outside of their slums. However these will probably be few compared to the number of children.

(Download my bibliography on slums: Zotero RDF | RIS)

Aparajeyo project, Pallabi

2008-04-18T07:56:00.000+01:00

Another visit to a slum education project, this time run by Aparajeyo Bangladesh. This project has daycare centres, a nursery, "Centre Based Education" for primary classes 1-6 (for children of minimum ages 6-11), and a coaching group for older children who attend a public or private school. The organisation also pays 50 per cent of fees for children who progress from their project to secondary school. In total 401 children are enrolled. Apparently none are working; there is another Aparajeyo project which targets working children. The centre has children's management groups which identify problems and discuss solutions with the managers, and once a week is 'Children's Day,' when the children get to run the centre themselves.

This project was really interesting, although due to my bad planning and shortage of time, the visit was the worst kind of flying visit — a stage-managed glimpse of how the project runs with very little depth of insight. Hoping to return there during one of the Children's Days to see how that works.

Survey piloting - 2

2008-04-16T11:30:00.007+01:00

Korail

A short boat trip away from BRAC Centre, Korail is the city's largest single slum.

Rent is around Tk. 900 (£7) per month. People cook on shared earth stoves and get water either from tubewells or communal taps.

We visited this small kindergarten, run by one of the slum's land owners. It went up to grade 2 but the children were aged up to at least 10. The government school is about 1 hour's walk away and difficult to get in to. Having finished at the kindergarten most of these children are unlikely to make the transition to further schooling. Fees here are Tk. 500 (£4) for registration, Tk. 150 (£1) per month tuition, Tk. 100 for grade 1 exam fees, Tk. 200 for grade 2 exam fees. Salaries for full-time teachers are Tk. 1000 (£8) per month.

There are also a number of small NGO schools in the area.

Though basic the school seemed well maintained, and was covered with instructional posters.

Cholontika Cluber Bastee, Mirpur

This turned out to be the really bad slum where I visited a BRAC school a week ago. Typical rent in the slum was Tk. 600-800 (£4-6). Each toilet was shared by 18 households. They got water from shared tubewells.

We spoke to one woman who was a landlord, owning 12 houses in the slum as well as her own (suggesting an income of around Tk. 8-9000 per month). She sent her daughter to an RNGPS where fees were: 1640 enrolment; 160 Tk per month tuition; 80 Tk exam fees. She had also spent Tk. 5000 on books and uniforms.

Cox's Bazaar / St Martin's Island

2008-04-15T08:00:00.001+01:00

Showing my commitment to keeping a close eye on my ongoing survey, decided to take a long weekend holiday to Cox's Bazaar - a popular and slightly overdeveloped beach resort - and St Martin's Island - a pretty and largely undeveloped island with no electricity or cars.

Cheeky mouse hiding behind my pillow in the beach hut on St Martin's Island. He kept popping out to try and eat our bananas.

Survey piloting

2008-04-07T11:27:00.001+01:00

Went to visit the four slum areas where the survey is being conducted by a team of investigators. First was Begunbari Pataton Bosti, Tejgaon.

This building contains 120 one-room households on three shakily constructed floors. The people live here worry constantly about it collapsing. There is a dispute between the landlord and the government over who owns this land, which could result in eviction. They pay around Tk. 1300 per month rent (£10), which per square metre is around 5 times as much as middle class families pay in Dhaka.

This girl went to a kindergarten (private) school, where fees were Tk. 3000 (£23) to register plus Tk. 150 (£1) per month.

Some of the rooms were too dark to fill in the survey - there had been a power cut since the previous day.

Lalbag Bosti

This slum was originally set up as a "sweeper colony" - people were invited to migrate from India to work as street sweepers. The housing was a combination of tin shacks and a much better 5-storey concrete building.

Some of the people here had relatively high incomes - around Tk. 8-10,000 (£60-80) per month for a family with two earners. This woman's husband was working in Malaysia and sending home money. Most of the children were going to school.

Study Areas

2008-04-03T09:10:00.004+01:00

... have been selected:

The entire project will go to 400 households in each area. My own survey will be given to those with children aged 11-15, which will be about half of them. The survey is due to start on Saturday.

My survey

2008-03-31T05:37:00.003+01:00

Here's my survey instrument. It will be administered to families with children aged 11-15 within a larger sample of 1600 families in 4 slums. Not expecting as many comments on this as on the rhino picture. Survey training is going on right now. The plan is to pilot the survey on Thursday morning and finalise it on Thursday afternoon... when things get going here they really move surprisingly quickly.

BRAC School, Mirpur

2008-03-29T10:19:00.004Z

Visited a school run by BRAC, the country's largest NGO. Saw class 1 and class 3, children aged 8-10. Parents’ occupations include rickshaw wallahs, day labourers including construction. Children’s work: boys often work in handicrafts (outside of house); girls work in home. Class runs for 4 hours per day in 2 shifts. There are about 36 children in each class. Children study Bangla, maths, English, social studies and also spend time dancing and singing. There are no fees and everything (books, pencils etc) is provided for free. The classes were noticeably free of repetition and children's work was up on display on the walls.

As I was about to leave they said the children would like to talk to me. In an awkward exchange the children took turns to stand up and ask me questions. One asked 'Any advice for us?' - I said 'Well erm you should probably study hard,' feeling a bit hypocritical. I asked the children if they liked school and they all said yes loudly. I asked what they liked /least/ about school. This made them glance around nervously and no one replied until the teacher picked one student to stand up and say something. But her reply was 'Nothing - everything is very good'. I asked the children what they wanted to be when they were older. A couple of girls said 'teacher' so I asked, who-all wants to be a teacher? Nearly all of the girls and a couple of the boys stood up. The remaining children wanted to be doctors, engineers or policemen. Apparently none of them were interested in going in to business or making money.

Afterwards visited some of the houses of the children's parents. This was by far the worst slum I have seen, claustrophobic, hot and full of stove fumes, with flimsy shacks being built literally on top of each other and only very narrow, muddy corridors between them.

River trip

2008-03-29T10:19:00.003Z

Went boating with some Dhaka-ite friends, five of us squeezing into a tiny CNG taxi to get down to the river. Waiting at the dock, we gathered a good audience as usual. The river is fascinating and it was fun at first, but we were unpleasantly close to the sewage-smelling water.

Bashbari

2008-03-29T10:14:00.002Z

Visited this drop-in centre for working children in Bashbari, Mohammadpur. It offers non-formal education and facilities like washrooms, lockers, health information, counselling, medical check-ups, games, tv, savings accounts. They are also referred to other places for free health services and vocational training. One of the children here is already a celebrity having featured in a Sport Relief documentary. Most of their families have a total income between Tk. 2100-4000 (£16-30); but around a quarter were in the Tk. 1000-2000 range (£7-£15). The children themselves earn anything between Tk. 10 and Tk. 100 per day (between 8p and 80p) working as rubbish collectors, part-time domestic helpers, and porters. According to the centre's staff, everyone living in this community is part of the 'hardcore poor' and none of them use the two government schools that are nearby, mainly because they rely on the children's incomes, but also because of costs like uniforms and tuition fees. This project has a pragmatic stance of giving the children basic reading and writing skills, together with various other services, rather than trying to get them into government schools.

The game shown here is called carrom and involves using little discs to tap other little discs into holes on a board.

Farmgate

2008-03-20T08:52:00.001Z

Experimenting with bus travel as a way of getting around the city -- tricky when you can't read the destinations. Usually people hang out of the bus door shouting the route incomprehensibly quickly; tickets are sometimes bought on the bus, at other times from men sitting behind small desks on the pavement near the (unmarked) bus stop. Farmgate is one of the city's most manic hubs - these photos don't do it justice.

Bardihara slum visit

2008-03-20T08:48:00.000Z

Met Julian (on the right in the photo) who is starting a small scale project, teaching only 5 children (all girls, aged 12-16) from a slum near Baridhara tailoring and general education with the aim that they will enter a government school within a year or two. Spent the afternoon walking around the slum and talking with Julian and her students. The tailoring class shown here is also the tailoring teacher's house.

On the way home with my flat mate - we get mobbed by increasing numbers of very excited children each day.

Bowniabadh school visits

2008-03-18T06:47:00.002Z

At last doing something resembling primary research - last Thursday went with two colleagues to visit a school run by a local NGO, Surovi, with technical and financial support from Plan Bangladesh. The area, Bowniabadh Colony, has been around since 1971 so is relatively developed compared to most slums in terms of housing and the services available there. (Coincidentally it is near Mirpur, the location of the zoo in the last post).

The school has around 500 students aged about 6-14 (primary and lower secondary). According to the headmaster, drop-out and grade repetition were very low (less than 5 per cent) and attendance very high (over 90 per cent). Teaching is in two shifts - the lower grades are taught from 8 till 10.30 and higher grades from 11 till 2.30. Teachers' salaries start at around £300 a year. The headmaster said that one of the strengths of the school was child-centred and participatory learning, although we had our doubts about that.

from my notes...
Class visits: First we visited a grade 1 class. The children were taking turns to stand at the front and repeat a call-and-response rhyme about health. The room seemed fairly well decorated with teaching materials and equipped with blackboard; there was plenty of space for the number of students. Later we visited a grade 5 English class. The students were standing in an arc; one student would face his or her neighbour and say, “My friend is X, who is your friend?”, then the second student would turn to face the next student along and repeat the same formula. The teacher walked around the arc listening to whoever was currently saying the phrase.

The parents of children in this school are apparently mostly employed as day labourers (usually this means in the market or on construction sites), garment workers and rickshaw pullers. In retrospect it would have been good to have met some of the parents -- we met one parent from the School Management Committee, but as a relatively well-off businessman he was probably very atypical -- but it was getting close to lunch-time and we needed to get back to the office before the canteen closed. Making more similar visits this and next week.

Mirpur zoo

2008-03-09T08:10:00.001Z

Set up some appointments to talk to people, so feeling less deskbound. Talked to Sabina Faiz Rashid, a medical anthropologist, about some of the difficulties in research with people living in slums. (She asked, 'You're going to be here for at least a year, right?' Umm...).

Today I'll be going to the Centre for Urban Studies who conducted a slum census, to talk about possible study sites.

Leisure-wise I went to the zoological gardens with my flatmate Hailey.

Very peaceful and nice to get away from the pollution of the city, but many people ignored the animals to stare at us and take photos.

The rhinocerous is a friendly and pacific animal that likes nothing more than to be teased by children with sticks.

Bird flu text

2008-03-06T09:09:00.002Z

Every mobile phone owner received this message. If the Ministry says it's okay it must be...

Still no survey

2008-02-28T04:16:00.001Z

It's looking like my research will be combined with a larger study conducted by BU-IED. This may mean things take longer to get going as it's a big project. Still, hoping at least to get out of the office for some preliminary informal interviews and to talk to other researchers a bit, and to start thinking about study sites. The BU-IED survey will cover around 2000 households in 4 slums. One of them will be the huge Karail slum mentioned below.

In the meantime, more photos of unsafe construction sites and everyday life...

We found this tarantula on the kitchen wall and decided to leave it there, in the hope that it will catch some of the mosquitos. To be honest though it seems better equipped for small mammals. It doesn't bother with a web, preferring to wait for something worth jumping on.

There are also a couple of camera-shy geckos which we hope won't get eaten by the spider.

Me outside the flat, trying to hear the mobile over the traffic noise.

Kids playing in the (somewhat unclean) lake near Karail.

Not kidnapped just lazy

2008-02-17T08:15:00.004Z

Thanks to everyone who has complained about me not posting anything here. Hope you haven't been put off and stopped checking. The first month was allocated to settling in, learning some basic Bengali, finding a place to stay and being ill. All four of these tasks now completed, I can start looking towards starting my research. In the mean time here are some pictures from the my daily journey from the training centre where I've been staying to my Bengali language school.

The training centre (and also the Institute for Educational Development) are in Niketan, which according to my 2004 Lonely Planet map is part of a big lake, but is now a huge construction site full of unsafe-looking bamboo scaffolding.

Large gates punctuate the journey - these seem to function partly as a zoning system for the city's rickshaws.

The next part of the journey is a series of market lanes.
Taking this photo caused a retinue of small children to gather around and follow me for the next half hour.
Emerging from the market area onto the congested main road at Mohakali

Further on I cross the land-filled bridge through Bonani Lake, surrounded by slum housing and with a few skyscrapers visible through the heavy smog. The city's largest slum, Karail, with over 100,000 residents, is near here, although this slum is apparently being cleared.

New flat

Moved in on Friday to this new, wastefully huge and slightly under-furnished flat in Bonani. The photos don't do justice to the echo-y expanses of empty space. Had to find somewhere quickly and this place was available for short let and reasonably priced, but yes, there are some contradictions involved in doing slum research whilst living in a flat that has a laundry room bigger than most people's entire dwellings.

Visa

2008-01-31T20:42:00.000Z

Got my visa, after 3 trips to London. Since it was really hard to find information about visas in advance, the following might be useful for others getting visas for Bangladesh in the UK...

There are at least four types of visa: tourist, business, research, and student. Tourist visas seem the easiest to get, are for up to 2 months, and I don't think anything is required - although according to the High Commission website you need something like a letter confirming your reservation with a hotel. For a business visa (up to 6 months) you need a letter confirming you work for a UK company, and possibly a letter from a company/organisation in Bangladesh as well. For a student visa I think you just need a letter of invitation from the university in Bangladesh. For a research visa you need a letter from the Bangladesh Ministry of Education. I asked for a research visa but was gently persuaded to apply for a student visa instead... I complied not wanting to quibble about whether my primary purpose is really 'research' or 'study'. Student visa options were single-entry 3 months (around £40), double-entry 6 months (around £50), or multiple entry 1 year (around £70 I think). Be prepared for multiple trips to the Commission.

A somewhat stressful last day in UK, packing and hauling my stuff in to the loft took most of the day, still have a few things to do and might try to get a few hours sleep before my 4.40am taxi.

Introduction

2008-01-17T22:19:00.000Z

I'm going to Dhaka, Bangladesh in just under two weeks to do research for my DPhil which is on how households in slum areas make decisions about their children's schooling. I'm going to use this blog as a research and general journal and place to upload photos.

My DPhil is with the Centre for International Education, Sussex University, UK, and in Bangladesh I will be working with the Institute of Educational Development, BRAC University.

My draft research proposal (pdf) / summary (pdf).

This is near where I'll be staying: