An initiative to bring a positive change through education

Do you know about Chittagong Hill Tracts? Some of you have heard about Bangladesh, a developing country in Asia. Then you should go a bit deep inside of this country to know about Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) where more than 11 indigenous minority groups are living in the green hills and mountains. They are completely different from the majority community in case of facial structure, language, culture and other traditions. They are Bangladeshi but not the Bengali, they are indigenous. Those indigenous people are living in three places of Chittagong Hill Tracts called Khagrachari, Rangamati and Bandarban and struggling to establish their own identify and reach the basic human rights. Indigenous population only covers 2% overall 100% population in Bangladesh. However, only 10% from indigenous community can access to education considering Primary, High School and upper level education. Lack of education creates lack of opportunities, access to job sector and which leads to less development among the indigenous communities. And also infrastructure problem in Bangladesh which make the Indigenous people to face discrimination, oppression in own country such as don’t have rights in own lands where they and their forefathers are living for hundreds of years. This above issue is related to my root where I belong to and these back warded people are my people. Since my child hood I always wanted to help the indigenous communities but due to my own obstacles, lack leadership experiences and also lack of supervising I could not contribute. But now after coming to Asian University for Women (AUW) I got to know women leaders from across the globe, have met with the changmakers which had inspired me to take an initiative. Now I have started an initiative to create a change under supervision of one of our professor with 10 students from AUW. We will be mentoring 10 students from Indigenous minority group. This mentorship program will be helpful to the marginalized population to step forward toward higher education I guess. The general objectives of this project are
1: Raising awareness about the importance of education, basic life skills and learning competency
2. To equip students with their books and tuition fees so that they will work hard in their studies
For further information, CHT is the place where people often don’t have access due to problems in transport system in some remote areas and due to stereotypes also such as some of the people think CHT is not a safe place to travel. And students who will be mentoring often they won’t be able to visit their mentees. So here mobile communication can help out us and act as a solution to this problem. I feel this is the power of digital communication; the way we are connecting to World Pulse with the internet. In hill tracts some students only know about the mobile not about the social medias. Some students have never seen a computer in their life and don’t have any idea how to use it. The students who will be mentoring can communicate with their mentees through the mobile to share their ideas and guide them and we will be visiting them once or twice a year. Here, we mentors are girls, university students and we care for diversity, equality and social justice.