Bangladesh – ‘Children’s village’ rehabilitates mothers; teaches them life skills to support their families

Location: Sreepur, Gazipur- Bangladesh

Language: Bengali

Voice: Natural

Duration: 00:06:01

Source: A24 

Restrictions: A24 clients

Dateline: 28.03.2022

Storyline

Founded in 1989, the Shishu Polli Plus multipurpose village was established with an international initiative to support mothers and children to keep female-led families together. To keep families together, the village offers rehabilitation services that include literacy, life skills, and income-generating skills in a safe environment. Most training focus on homestead gardening, sack gardening, tailoring and garments, bamboo weaving, puffed rice making, grocery shop and tailoring shop management, hand-loom material decoration, jute products making, and livestock rearing. Maya Halder, who is a coordinator at Shishu Palli Plus, said the earnings generated here are used for sustaining services and to keep the services for mothers and children flowing, adding that there are foreign clients and local clients.

Shotlist

(SOUNDBITE) Shohel Mahmood, Co-ordinator, Livelihood & Training,  Shishu Palli Plus

“Every mother come here for three years. Within these three years, we give them a six-month training course. So within three years, each mother used to get 5-6 training. We assess each mother by IRP [Individual Rehabilitation Plan]. For that, we talk with every mother individually. We try to understand according to her home, location, need, her daily life, her kids, her surroundings, etc. Based on those we, select trainings for that mother. ”

(SOUNDBITE) Nasrin Nahar Nipu, Trainer, Apparel Training School, Shishu Palli Plus

“I am a trainer in the garments section of Shishu Palli Plus. I train the mothers for weaving short-sleeve tee-shirt, hoodies, sweaters, tee-shirts, long-sleeve tee-shirts, etc. The garments we make here during training sessions are used for the mothers and children living here.”

(SOUNDBITE) Maya Halder, Co-ordinator, Design & Production, Sreepur Village Trade center, Shishu Palli Plus

“The earnings generated from here are used for the mothers and children living here. We have two types of clients; foreign buyers and local buyers. In the case of foreign buyers, after they choose the design, we used to send them a sample. After they choose it, we send it for production. We produce that selected product by the producers from outside or by the successful mothers who already got training on that by us. ”

(SOUNDBITE) Aslam Hossain Khan, Co-ordinator, Care & Education in Shishu Palli Plus

“After recruiting a mother, we do an IRP [Individual Rehabilitation Plan] for her and open a file under her name. We find out what sort of potentiality she has, what she already knows, what she wants to know, and how she wants to be rehabilitated. We select training for her based on that. This is one side. Another side is, we enroll her in a literacy program. Because one of the main criteria of the training is literacy. If they have literacy, they will be able to reach the training target easily. When she enrolled in the literacy program, there also she has to go through an assessment. Even if mother come hereafter SSC (Secondary School Certificate), we try to complete her HSC (Higher Secondary Certificate) through distance learning.”

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