WUNRN
BANGLADESH - "INFO LADIES"
ON BICYCLES BRING REMOTE BANGLADESH VILLAGES ONLINE
"Info ladies" crisscross the Bangladesh countryside offering the chance to see a loved one, get a blood sugar check or even legal advice.
Bangladeshi info ladies in Saghata, a remote impoverished farming village
in Gaibandha District,
Julien Bouissou- 30 July 2013
As she approaches the village, Sathi rings her bicycle bell and the children come running to meet her, shouting "Hello, hello". Women emerge from their homes one by one. Sitting in the middle of a beaten-earth yard, Sathi carefully places her laptop on a plastic chair, plugs in headphones and launches a session on Skype. The faces of village men working thousands of kilometres from here appear on the screen.
"It's like my brother was standing right there, except I can't touch
him. What's more he's put on weight and lost colour since he started work in
Iraq," says a worried Sumita. She keeps saying "As-salamu
alaykum" and "Hello", for fear he might vanish. "It's a bad
connection," Sathi explains. "It's a public holiday and everyone
wants to call the Gulf states, so it's busy."
A session costs a fortune, equivalent to about $3 an hour. "But the price includes technical support or volume adjustment," Sathi adds. Even at this price Skype is a great success. In Bangladesh, population 152 million, only 5 million people are connected.
So 56 "info ladies" crisscross the countryside, dressed in blue
and pink uniform and carrying in their bags a laptop, a camera to make films or
take wedding snaps, but also tests for blood sugar and pregnancy, and of course
some cosmetics and shampoo. Thanks to their PC connected to the "new
world" via a USB stick, these women can call up information beyond the
reach of village schoolteachers. Internet access is an instrument of
emancipation too. The women advise farmers and sometimes even offer legal
advice.
Information needs these "ladies" to reach its destination, because "browsing the net is like flying a rocket to land on another planet", Sathi says. "It scares lots of people." But technology is not only for those who know how to use it; it's also for those who want to appropriate it. The women swap helpful advice and sometimes spend whole nights solving a technical hitch. The D.net non-profit organisation [PDF], which launched the scheme in 2008, trains the women for three months on how to use the hardware, at centres close to their home. To start their business they need to take out a loan: roughly $650.
They make an early start. At 6am Jeyasmin prepares a meal outside her hut, consisting mainly of rice, then takes her daughter to school. When she returns men are already waiting anxiously, eager to check their blood sugar. Ever since Jeyasmin organised a session on this subject, many of the residents think they have diabetes. "Villagers are not generally ready to purchase information, so the ladies sell them accompanying services, like medical tests or natural fertilisers," D.net head Ananya Raihan explains. A few hours later several teenage women are waiting for Jeyasmin in the shade of a date tree. She shows them a video, with white-coated experts talking and pointing to animated graphics over their heads. "Doctors never come to see us, so we might as well watch them on a PC. But it's a pity they don't answer our questions," says one of the young women. When Jeyasmin takes out her weighing machine, it draws a big crowd. They climb on to the machine, standing tall and not batting an eyelid, for fear of upsetting it.
Many of the younger women confide in the info ladies. "They understand our worries and don't make judgments," says one of them. Some teenagers even ask the women to buy them underwear, sanitary towels and makeup in town, because generally only the men go to market. The purveyors of information also have what they call their "Facebook secrets", or indeed the Skype equivalent. After creating a Facebook account, Golapi Akter met a Bangladeshi who lives in Dubai. "There are so many men who live in Facebook," she whispers. She chats with him every week on Skype and even introduced him to her parents with her webcam.
With monthly earnings of about $150 some of the women invest in other ventures. Sathi, for instance, has used her savings to turn her parents' stall into a rural supermarket, setting a whole new trend. It sells first-aid kits, USB sticks, medicine, toys, DVDs and even special kits for repairing mobiles that have dropped into the water on a paddy field. There is a small parking area outside for bicycles. The undertaking has turned out very well and the budding entrepreneur has invested in a generator, so she can show Bollywood movies, even when there's a power cut.
The info-ladies project is still a pilot scheme. It has failed in conservative areas where it is very difficult for women to have a job and where the number of migrants working overseas is too low for the Skype service to show a viable return. In the areas where the business model works, there are plans for the women to be paid to carry out market research. It has also been suggested that they should use tablet computers, which are more dust-resistant than conventional PCs. With this version new recruits would need to find $2,000 to buy into the info-lady franchise.
___________________________________________________
-----
Original Message -----
From: WUNRN
ListServe
To: WUNRN ListServe
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2012 12:49 PM
Subject: Bangladesh - Bicycling "Info Ladies" Bring
Internet to Villages
WUNRN
BANGLADESH - BICYCLING "INFO
LADIES" BRING INTERNET TO REMOTE VILLAGES
Associated Press - November 2, 2012
JHARABARSHA, Bangladesh — Amina Begum had never seen a computer until a few years ago, but now she’s on Skype regularly with her husband. A woman on a bicycle brings the Internet to her.
Dozens of “Info Ladies” bike into remote Bangladeshi villages with laptops and Internet connections, helping tens of thousands of people — especially women — get everything from government services to chats with distant loved ones. It’s a vital service in a country where only 5 million of 152 million people have Internet access.
The Info Ladies project, created in 2008 by local development group D.Net and other community organizations, is modeled after a program that helped make cellphones widespread in Bangladesh. It intends to enlist thousands more workers in the next few years with startup funds from the South Asian country’s central bank and expatriates working around the world.
D.Net recruits the women and trains them for three months to use a computer, the Internet, a printer and a camera. It arranges bank loans for the women to buy bicycles and equipment.
“This way we are providing jobs to jobless women and at the same time empowering villagers with critical information,” said Ananya Raihan, D.Net’s executive director.
The women — usually undergraduates from middle-class rural families — aren’t doling out charity. Begum pays 200 takas ($2.40) for an hour of Skype time with her husband, who works in Saudi Arabia.
Begum smiles shyly when her husband’s cheerful face pops up. With earphones in place, she excitedly tells him she received the money he sent last month. He asks her to buy farm land.
Even Begum’s elderly mother-in-law now uses Skype to talk with her son.
“We prefer using Skype to mobile phones because this way we can see him on the screen,” Begum said, beaming happily from her tiny farming village in Gaibandha district, 120 miles (192 kilometers) north of the capital, Dhaka.
In the neighboring village of Saghata, an Info Lady is 16-year-old Tamanna Islam Dipa’s connection to social media.
“I don’t have any computer, but when the Info Lady comes I use her laptop to chat with my Facebook friends,” she said. “We exchange our class notes and sometimes discuss social issues, such as bad effects of child marriage, dowry and sexual abuse of girls.”
The Info Ladies also provide a slew of social services — some for a fee and others for free.
They sit with teenage girls where they talk about primary health care and taboo subjects like menstrual hygiene, contraception and HIV. They help villagers seeking government services write complaints to authorities under the country’s newly-enacted Right to Information Act.
They talk to farmers about the correct use of fertilizer and insecticides. For 10 takas (12 cents) they help students fill college application forms online. They’re even trained to test blood pressure and blood sugar levels.
“The Info Ladies are both entrepreneurs and public service providers,” Raihan said.
Raihan borrowed the idea from Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who in 2004 introduced mobile phones to rural women who had no access to telephones of any kind, by training and sending out scores of “Mobile Ladies” into the countryside.
That hugely successful experiment drew in commercial mobile phone operators. Now more than 92 million people in Bangladesh have cellphone access.
Nearly 60 Info Ladies are working in 19 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts. By 2016, Raihan hopes to train 15,000 women.
In July, Bangladesh’s central bank agreed to offer interest-free loans to Info Ladies. Distribution of the first phase of loans, totaling 100 million takas ($1.23 million), will begin in December. Raihan said D.Net is also encouraging the large population of Bangladeshi expatriates to send money home to help Info Ladies get started.
“It’s very innovative,” says Jamilur Reza Chaudhury, a pioneer of information technology education in Bangladesh. “The project is really having an impact on the people at grass-root level.”
Info Lady Sathi Akhtar, who works in Begum’s and Dipa’s villages, said she makes more at the job than she would as a school teacher. She said that after making payments on her 120,000 taka ($1,480) loan and covering other costs, she takes home an average of 10,000 takas ($123) a month.
“We are not only earning money, we are also contributing in empowering our women with information. That makes us happy.”