Floating Education and Health Centre Bangladesh

Through a December 2012 baseline survey, findings were gathered on the following in order to establish community needs: socio demographic profile; education (child enrolment, quality and success, challenges and expectation); health (awareness, behaviour, and challenges for accessing health services); livelihood (household asset, skills, income and expenditure, liabilities); governance (perception, decisionmaking process of local government, and access to services); empowerment (family level, social or institutional affiliation, and role); and child rights (awareness/knowledge on child rights and child protection).

Among the report's recommendations are the following:

• "Individual, family community level awareness initiatives are needed on education, health and good governance.
• Community people should be made aware of the structure, functions and services of Union Parishad [the smallest rural administrative and local government units in Bangladesh].
• Child and Family friendly education and health facilities should be provided to ensure better access for people and to strengthen their education and health rights.
• For women’s empowerment, besides working with women special measures should be taken to work with male family members to make them aware of women’s empowerment issues.
• Community based groups should be formed in the areas of education, health and livelihood."

The project, at the time of this posting, involved 32 local primary school teachers, 15 local (Upazila Level) government officials, 14 local representatives of government, 15 volunteers, a parents' group, and management committees from 4 local villages.

Community awareness activities include: folk songs; drama, through a contracted drama team; community meetings in 15 villages, and documentary film viewings for awareness on health, education, and rights issues, the latter two organised by a community facilitator, volunteers, and a social communicator, based on the different issues in question.

In the evenings, the floating schools act as a community resource centre serving 150,000 members of the population with health and social awareness programmes to improve their health-seeking behaviour and to encourage them to practise their human rights and access government services. Nearly half of the population in the programme area is now aware of their rights and entitlements thanks to the documentary films shown from the boats for people to watch from the banks, according to the project website.

Outputs of these events, according to a project report, include:

• "[I]ncreased birth registration of child
• Reduced unsocial activities
• Ensured health check-up of mother and child
• Reduced drop out and absent of student
• [I]ncreased involvement of community people to social development issues."

Education, Children, Health, Rights