Many young people living in rural areas of Bangladesh face challenges that influence their development as active citizens. Especially for young women, cultural barriers, security issues and limited access to employment impacts their lives.

To tackle these problems, young rural Bangladesh was included in the Empower Youth for Work (EYW) programme. This 5 year program has the ambition to promote rural job creation in 4 countries; Pakistan, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Bangladesh. The EYW in Bangladesh is in 4 districts, and for the first rural hub we chose the Khulna district. So we started organizing an exchange visit to inspire a local learning group.

The experts team and EYW team from Bangladesh found 4 topics for solutions that are crucial to set up rural hubs.

We worked on a selection of solutions from around to world and presented it to the Bangladesh team, who chose the solutions most suitable for their local context.

The time was ready to form a learning group with powerful actors out of EYW project in the KHULNA district

The team chose 3 projects from India for a learning exchange, for which our experts group made a tailor made program.

The 10 day visit to India began. First they visited the Barefoot College, which focuses on local urgent issues: clean water, solar energy and health knowledge. After the visit there was a collective reflection session to share what they had learned.

The second visit was to Honey Bee Network, which scouts innovative rural ideas and offers technical support and marketing strategy while assuring that ownership of the innovation stays with the rural women. It’s a unique collaboration between rural communities and a national certified University, and it has collected over 275000 innovative ideas and practices, including solutions for sexual and reproductive health issues like sanitary pads.

With 102 community owned centres, Read Global offers access to information, job recruiting and child care. Community members work on their own enterprises, such as a community radio, a sewing cooperative and agricultural cooperatives. The centre´s owned enterprises make them sustainable.

To consolidate what was learnt, the team spent the last day formulating an action plan with ideas on how to implement it in Bangladesh.

Three months after their visit to India, representatives of READ Centre and Honey Bee Network visited the learning group in Bangladesh to see what had been achieved. In a 3-day programme, they helped implement the learnings further by giving suggestions and new ideas.