RIA: Voices from Durgapur

(Header image credit: Voices from Durgapur 2019 ARBAN CC-BY)

Research Initiation Awards are small awards open only to people or organisations from outside the university. Our aim is to support individual people or community organisations to begin to build the relationships or help create the conditions that could initiate future engaged research.

A team from ARBAN, an NGO committed to developing the lives of the rural community in a remote area of Bangladesh, has decided to take the initiative to engage members of the community to tell their own stories. In this engaged process, the villagers tell their stories in their  way, identifying the issues and factors that affect their wellbeing and prioritising the solutions.

In this project, young mothers from Durgapur, a remote area in the north-western part of Bangladesh, met in their courtyards to talk about maternal health, child care, and reproductive health with a gender specialist and fieldworkers from ARBAN.

The ARBAN team also organised a round-table discussion with local service providers (government officials, NGO representatives, business community and other private agencies) to share the findings from the women’s discussions.

Read the final report: Voices from Durgapur