Bangladesh Friendship Education Society (BFES) is a non-government development organisation based in Bangladesh. It was established in 1993 and its mission is to promote educational projects in rural areas. The founders are educationalists and development practitioners.
BFES is a culmination of
thoughts & ideas to improve education at all levels by a group of
civil society members from Bangladesh. It has been established in 1994
with some Japanese Patrons who started school scholarship programmes at
village levels to stop children from fropping out of the education system. Later, the idea
was adopted by the government of Bangladesh to provide scholarships to
school children.
BFES considers the immense power of information and communication technology (ICT) to be central in the implementation of its activities. Some of BFES’ development projects are the school education support, the rural development programme and the information technology for the poor.
School education support: The support is essentially baseb on providing financial assistance to schools at primary and secondary levels, students of poor families, special education programmes, teacher training for quality improvement, exchange programmes;
Rural development programme: This works by providing skills training, vocational education for alternate employment, women’s development through group education, training and micro-credit for economic emancipation;
Information technology for the poor: As an innovative approach for development education at the village level in schools and community by facilitating ICT intervention, BFES acts all over Bangladesh;
Advocacy: In different development and human rights issues by organising workshops, seminarss, publication and exchange programmes.
Some of BFES projects are especially current
The ‘Amader Gram’ ICT4D project undertakes initiatives to achieve social and economic justice. ‘Amader Gram’ (a village in Bangladesh), is the fist social innovation of its kind in the country. It has created a number of ‘Knowledge Centers’ (a rural information centre that provides skill development training particularly for the unemployed youth groups and adolescents girls in ICT uses, data collection, compilation, analysis and information sharing) as a new model for information retrieval and storage, knowledge acquisition and management at the grass root level, and became part of local community development efforts. The Village Database Program (http://www.amadergram.org/projects.html)
website contains more information on this initiative.
by providing education and training to improve livelihoods and health
status. Rural women are serving as Knowledge Workers for Knowledge
Transfer activity which given them new status in the society. Women are
managing on line health services program, community education programme. ‘Gramer Khabar’ represents the rural news online – a pilot
initiative and the first of its kind in Bangladesh, trained and
developed by these women ‘Knowledge Workers’ to skillfully handle the internet
facilities and produce an online rural newsletter which is updated at
least three times daily.
National level ICT Policy Advocacy (www.bfes.net) is
one of BFES’s prime agenda by which it tries to convince the government to pursue quality education through the use of ICT, participation in the World Summit on the Information Society and developing a
national broadband policy.
Other BFES activities include a knowledge fair. This is an innovative
effort to introduce ICTs to rural communities as a tool for development
that is appropriate to the ICT illiterate and other skills and
experience for disadvantaged communities.
BFES enjoys very good partnerships with some South Asian NGOs and civil society
organisations. It has organised many regional events in Bangladesh on
ICTs and internet issues. This is part of BFES’s regional interest and efforts to establish a South Asia network for knowledge sharing. BFES has also been in active in mobilising multi-stakeholder groups
around the submarine cable initiative which if successful should bring
more affordable internet broadband access to many Bangladeshi people.
The new APC-member also hosted the 2006 South Asian ICT policy
workshop, which was seen to be a great success by all who attended, and
work closely with VOICE an existing APC member and BNNRC.
BFES believes in this type of regional integration. It nonetheless pursues a strong local involvement strategy in parrallel. Reza Salim, the initiator of the Amader Gram ICT4D project and co-founder of BFES, spends 50% of his time at the
project area, which is a remote village 400 kilometres away from Gangladesh’s capital city Dhaka.
BFES has UN accreditation for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and served as the Focal Point for South Asian Civil Society Group.
