The capital city of Bangladesh, Dhaka, is a megacity with the fastest growth of population in the world. However, 60% of Dhaka city’s residents live in less developed slum areas. People living in these slum areas constantly face poor living conditions, environmental pollution, health hazards, and abuse. The slums are also usually situated in fragile low-lying areas for which the urban poor living in these slums are highly vulnerable to natural disasters.
Being informal settlers, these inhabitants have limited access to water and sanitation, education, healthcare, and social services and constantly face threats of eviction. There is no strong catalyst or change agent including civil society organizations or youth groups in the slum areas, who can work for the slum dwellers to uphold their voice due to lack of knowledge and capacity. As a result, slum inhabitants do not have a voice and role in decision-making processes at any sphere of policy-making level neither at local, city nor national level.
The Featuring Green Earth project, implemented by Plan International Bangladesh in collaboration with Bangladesh Youth Environmental Initiative (BYEI) supports the youth of the slum to become strong activists by creating awareness and visibility about the inequality that exists in Dhaka. Under this project, Earth Club, which was established in the worst slum areas of Dhaka City, consists of young women and men in and outside formal schools in targeted slum areas. The Earth Club aims to strengthen the dynamic and diversity of civil society in slum areas by building the capacity of its members through action learning.
Featuring Green Earth was funded by Operation A Day’s Work (Denmark) from June 2018 to June 2021.
Impact:
- 97% of the Earth Club members have improved their capacity by the trainings organised by clubs and they have improved their capacity on environmental health, club management, life skill development, rooftop gardening, COVID-19 prevention, entrepreneurship, influencing duty bearers, and negotiating with local authorities.
- EC members have participated in different slum development activities like waste management campaign, COVID-19 prevention campaign, tree plantation programme, improving sanitation, developing community-based waste management systems, introducing eco-friendly bathing places for women, social campaigns, water supply establishments, solar light distributions and organising a Global Climate Strike.
- Community members have also benefited from the club activities. 91% of community members have benefited from the environment improvements, 78% on waste management, 72% on tree plantation, 48% on Eco-friendly bathroom construction, 31% on improved water supply, 22% on slum disaster management.
Learn more about Featuring Green Earth here
