Settling in and Running Focus Groups

 

My new home for the next few months is pretty special. Rural Bangladesh is beautiful; vibrant green fields fill most of the land, paddy fields are everywhere you look and huge palm trees tower in the background. In our small village, life happens at a much slower pace compared to the UK. Farmers work tirelessly under the sun while the bumpy roads are occupied with laughing children walking to school, colourful rickshaws and beeping autos. The noisiness of Dhaka has been replaced with waves of silence, birds singing and the faint hum of prayers from the local mosque. A buzz of noise can be found at the local market which is packed with small stalls selling various items such as patterned fabrics, chai and snacks.

My team and I are staying at the local YMCA guesthouse which has all the usual facilities plus a team room (where we have our meetings and plan activities), a spacious garden and wifi! We received an amazing welcome from the previous volunteers who prepared a song for us and are now being well looked after by the lovely YMCA staff.

 

After settling in it was time to get started on our project. The first stage involved researching what problems there are in the local communities through focus groups. By engaging directly with the local people, we can fully understand what the most prominent issues are, why these happen and what we need to do to help overcome these.

In total, we conducted 11 focus groups throughout various communities. As a team, we created general questions which would be asked to all the different groups. These included questions such as ‘what are the challenges you face in your daily life?’ and ‘how would you like to see your community improved?’ As well as questions which specifically applied to the group being interviewed. I helped conduct three of the focus groups; below are my different findings.

Young Women

Women in Bangladesh are burdened with problems and discrimination due to simply being born a girl. This affects all areas of their lives from accessing education to getting married. After reading so much about gender inequality in Bangladesh, I looked forward to hearing from some actual Bengali women. We interviewed 15 girls who were in between 13 to 18 years old and found the following:

•  Poverty was the main barrier to accessing education; families were unable to afford school fees or transport to school.

• A lot of girls spoke about having a lack of freedom to do things and make decisions about their lives. Women were able to stay in education up until secondary school but weren’t allowed by their parents to continue to higher education. This was due to girls not being allowed to study in another town or parents not understanding the point in further education, as they believed their daughters would soon be mothers and housewives.

•  Early marriage had decreased in their village due to more girls now going to school. The women agreed there was not a lot of external pressure to get married at a young age,and all the girls in the village should get married only when they are 18 or above.

Overall, the group expressed quite a positive view which was good to see. However, we felt that some of the answers had been ‘sugar coated’ and the girls weren’t necessarily providing the full picture.

 

High School Students

We are the first cohort to conduct a focus group with high school students; we felt it was important to speak students and understand their perspective as a younger generation. We spoke to a mixed sex class of 40 students at a local high school. The main findings showed:

•  There were lots of disruptions to the students’ learning. A key one was sanitation; there are not enough toilets in the school and even though there is a tube well, the water isn’t very clean. The lessons do not run regularly due to a lack of teachers and classrooms as well as frequent power cuts.

 

•  Another key barrier experienced by the female students was ‘eve teasing’. Eve teasing would be considered sexual harassment in the UK, but in Bangladesh, it is seen as normal, “innocent” behaviour. It can range from cat-calling to full on touching, often the girl is blamed if she is eve teased as she must have done something to encourage this behaviour. The female students mentioned they regularly experience eve teasing on the way to school, this included being pinched and having rocks thrown at them.
  Eve teasing has now even found its way online with males setting up fake social media accounts and posting inappropriate statuses.  Whilst I was in an auto, I saw a middle aged man try and grab a very young girl’s school book, while he rode past her on his bike. It felt very creepy and discomforting just  witnessing this behaviour, so I can imagine how horrible it must be for young girls to have to experience this on a daily basis.

 

• All students had an understanding of gender equality and agreed boys are allowed to do a lot more things than girls which is unfair. Some female students mentioned they learn about this issue through TV programmes such as Meena and Raju, a cartoon created by UNICEF promoting children’s rights.

 

 

Disabled School Teachers 

There are 16 million disabled people in Bangladesh who receive little or no support from the government. Right by our village, there is a small disabled school which is funded by a local NGO. All the staff are volunteers and about 50 students, who have a range of disabilities, attend the school. We spoke to 8 of the teachers and found that:

• Disability is viewed in a very negative way by the local communities. There is a belief that having a disabled child is a curse from God and it is some fault of the parents. Many people think disabled people are incapable of doing anything, including going to school, so are viewed as a burden to their family.

 

• Disabled children are vulnerable to verbal and physical abuse and are often bullied by others. Individuals have no real understanding of what disability is and how it  might make someone act or appear  differently.

 

• The biggest problem the teachers face is a lack of funding; they are unable to buy much needed equipment such as sensory toys and a projector which would be a big help to the students’ learning. The biggest improvement is that more children are attending the school and receiving an education.

 

 

 

Conducting the focus groups was eye opening and it enabled me to hear many different, and at times, upsetting stories and views. My team and I have compiled all the data from the interviews and highlighted the key issues. We have created workshops to be  performed to local communities,which help tackle some of these problems- I will be posting about this soon. Thanks for reading this (extra long) post!

All  the amazing photos featured on this blog post have been taken by my good friend and fellow volunteer,  Ray. To see more of Ray’s inspiring photos, you can check out his website here.