Life, Tradition & People

Life In Monsoon

In flood-prone Bangladesh, drowning is the single leading cause of death among children aged 1-17, having overtaken pneumonia and diarrhea. There is a clear seasonal pattern for drowning, the death rate rises steeply during the monsoon season when the rainfall is high and low-lying areas go under flood water. Nearly 17,000 children drown annually, an average of around 46 each day and over 68,000 cases of near-drowning a year. About 49% of deaths in the age group 1-9 years are due to drowning, in this way a total of 12,000 children die every year. This discourages rural parents to send their children to distant schools.

During the monsoon earthen roads become impassable, and many educational institutions located at riverside areas remain under flood water, therefore students cannot attend classes and remain out of education for a few months, and finally leave schools. With lack of practice, these neo-literates relapse into illiterates with in a year of leaving school.

Our Tradition

Due to the tradition, girls are not allowed to move around freely, even at early stages of their life which affects the girl children’s enrollment to the mainstream education. Further more, if poor parents can afford to send a child to school, it would most likely to be a son, as a girl child is an important source of labor for a poor family. More than 40 percent of the parents are landless, therefore, they are unable to send their children to distant schools as it consumes valuable working hours.

In Bangladesh the age of first marriage for females is 12-15 years, these illiterate girls are more likely to become mothers during adolescence, and each currently married female has 0.78 births and is suffering from serious physical illness. About 22 percent of deaths in the age group 10-45 years are due to domestic violence, half of which are suicide.

People We Work For

The people Shidhulai is working for are mostly children, girls and young women. Seventy percent of the target group is women. Because nowadays rural women are taking control over the key economic functions. Men’s involvement in agriculture has been reduced by one-third and the increase in labor supply to non-agriculture has increased 42% from 1987 to 2000. At the same time women have withdrawn labor from non-agriculture tasks and have increased the labor supply to agricultural activities. However, almost every working woman receives only half of the wage rate than their male counterpart got. Statistics show that these women are most often poorly trained, and as a result unemployed or underpaid.