Helping local Bangladesh communities organise in response to Covid-19
Law student and UofG Future World Changer Juneyna Kabir talks to us about her charity work helping communities affected by COVID-19 in her native Bangladesh
Tell us a little about yourself.
I'm a UofG Law student on the fast track course. I have just finished my first year and moving into my second year. I am from Dhaka, Bangladesh. I did an undergraduate degree in English and Media at Sussex University (2013-2016) and a MA in journalism (2016-2017) from the same. I was working in Bangladesh as a journalist and UX designer part-time for two years, before returning to academia. I'm a Future World Changer for 2019-2020 and my world changing ambition is to alter the current relationship that the world has with clothing - starting from the materials, the labour and consumer trends, everything needs to change. This is especially important to Bangladesh because we are the second largest producer of ready made garments in the world, a double-edged sword that has given a huge boost to our economy but at the cost of many lives and the environment.
What is the nature of your charity initiative?
The charity is called Resource Coordination Network Bangladesh (RCNB) - a platform for the sharing of resources required to combat the Covid-19 crisis in Bangladesh. It's not a registered charity; we operate out of a Facebook group with the eponymous name. In the first two weeks, our mission statement changed almost every day, as we were trying to figure our where our efforts would be most useful. Ultimately, we described ourselves as "a non-profit resource sharing platform and support network for small organisations in Bangladesh." Being a non-registered charity has its merits and drawbacks, merits because people liked that all of their funds would be going to the cause rather than a large portion being used on internal administrative costs while a lot of people (especially outside Bangladesh) are not familiar with informal channels of working
What moved you to set up RCNB?
It all began mid-March when one of my closest friends, Mahia, and I would talk on the phone regularly, discussing the moves of the government, anticipating how the crisis would play out in Bangladesh. It was scary for both of us personally, as my family is there and she herself (and her family) live in the midst of it. But while we felt our parents would be able to afford working from home and quality medical services, millions of others did not have that luxury. Small organisations and initiatives were already popping up, extending support by handing out food, hygiene kits, medical equipment etc to the less fortunate. I soon realised that there were many people sitting at home, who had the means and intention to donate but perhaps not the logistical framework to distribute rations on the ground. So, I proposed to Mahia that we put together a credible list of small-scale organisations that were involved and pass them on to our social networks, at least our family and friends, to raise money for them.
Our "credibility checks" were mainly phone calls to these various organisations by Mahia, asking what they did, where their areas of distribution were, trying to understand their scale and activities. As a result of this, two things happened:
1) Mahia became a repository of information about the activities of small relief-orientated activities in Bangladesh. When she would call people to ask what they did, they invariably shared with her their woes and challenges. Someone would complain that they had bought 1000 kgs of rice but did not have the manpower to hand it out. Others would say they had volunteer teams but had run out of funds to buy food items. Within the first two days, we had connected 5-10 different organisations with each other to collaborate and fill in the gaps with each other's resources. Very soon, we had changed our standard question from "What do you do?" to "How may we help you?". In a newly frenzied, Covid-19 Bangladesh this question perplexed many. People would say, how strange, most people call to ask for something, and you call to ask us what we need? They became curious, maybe even suspicious. They wanted to know "Who are you and what do you want?"
2) In order to be able to answer their questions, we developed an identity. We set up the Facebook group to coordinate our activities, create a centralised place where different stakeholders could interact and share resources and maintain a public database of sorts where our projects would be archived (this became necessary when we set up our own online fundraisers and had to be transparent about the money we raised). We also created a logo, made professional powerpoints to send to potential donors, gave interviews etc etc.
What have you achieved so far (in terms of funds, what the monies are doing)?
First and foremost, I'd like to highlight the people that we've met throughout this process - the numbers of selfless, hardworking, sincere and lovely people that we have collaborated and become friends with. We have created networks in areas that we would never have otherwise - in rural areas, in brothels, in refugee camps, in rural government hospitals, cyclone centres - you name it. Bangladeshis are extremely generous and hospitable people, so although the networks are most useful for the work we are doing, I can imagine that even in the future they would extend help in other ways. I would say the achievement here is that of trust. We're so grateful that people who to this day have never seen our faces or met us in person, have placed so much trust in two young girls with no prior experience to carry out such important tasks.
In terms of funds, initially we were simply connecting people who had something with people who needed something. But soon people started asking us for money. Being a developing country, Bangladesh has many national and international NGOs who would be responsible for coordinating a relief effort in such a situation. Many of them are huge, BRAC, Grameen, UNDP, Save the Children - these people we called the big players - and we had no comings and goings with them. Then there were mid-level people who were around before Covid-19 began, but had suddenly stepped up in scale. Even they, we realised, had their own process of fund raising and distribution. So we focused on small organisations or individual initiatives (this is very common, for families, or housing blocks or sports associations, for example, to do their own relief drives). Sometimes we would give people £1000 and sometimes we would merely send them a name for a trusted wholesaler from whom to buy their grains. The motto was that we were there for any kind of assistance we could provide, where we wanted nothing in return and all administrative costs were borne by us so whatever people donated went straight to people in need.
Our funds came from a whole range of places. I set up a Gofundme page where we have already crossed our £6000 target. The Gofundme was mainly for strangers and those living abroad (the Bangladeshi diaspora is always instrumental in relief efforts after times of crisis), but within Bangaldesh we had funds pouring in from family and friends through personal channels or people who would hear of us through word of mouth and send over £5000 in cheques, no questions asked. We had artists and small businesses donate all their earnings to us. We had restaurants deliver dinner to government hospitals as a donation to us. Money came from places we couldn't have imagined in our wildest dreams. People asked us to distribute their zakaat money, (a mandatory charity for muslims during the month of Ramadan) which was highly unexpected because usually an Islamic organisation has to do it.
About three weeks into our activities, we linked up with an American-Bangladeshi living in Texas, a banker, university professor and vocal writer on Bangladeshi issues who had set up a Facebook fundraiser of his own. Within a week, he had raised $16,000 and was looking for people like us - young, driven, trustworthy and with zero overheads to make use of the funds. Within a short span of time he had become a core team member, a mentor and we conducted many drives together. He also brought with him a huge number of contacts and resources of his own. RCNB was growing so much everyday. By the end of the month we had 700-800 members on our group and people were sharing our posts and fundraising links all the time.
We never had a rigid strategy on how we were to distribute the money we collected. We had found 5-6 small organisations dotted around Bangladesh, who we put on our "payroll" in some sense. They would receive bi-weekly funds for their relief distribution drives, and the rest given on a need-basis to people who would ask/we would come across. For example in the case of the sex workers or the tribal community in Northern Bangladesh, we were sent news articles about their plight and put out feelers to see who could help. People we had known for a day, or even those we hadn't talked to in decades, came out of the woodwork to coordinate the drives, locate volunteers and manage the entire project (we prefer the word initiative over project because people are not "projects").
We were even contacted by a gentleman from a village in Sindh, Pakistan who we sent £1000 for relief activities. In true South Asian style, he has now invited us to his village to stay with his family. This was an interesting one because we could not use our fundraiser money for this, however, and nor could we post about it openly. Bangladesh and Pakistan have a very sour relationship post the war of independence in 1971 and some Bangladeshis would not be happy that we were feeding Pakistani mouths when that could have gone to a Bangladeshi. These connections really made us feel the power of social media - this is Mark Zuckerberg's ticket to heaven, I tell you - every single thing we have done, every penny raised, every person we have met, has been through social media.
It would take me the whole day to list all the initiatives we have been a part of but they are all present on our RCNB Facebook group. Some I can list off the top of my head are - providing hygiene kits (PPE, gloves, sanitiser, bleach powder) to garbage workers, food relief to Santal tribal community, food relief to Bede community (nomadic snake charmer community), food relief for mothers and babies of sex workers, a month's worth food to garments factory workers, sanitary napkins and food to students of a female madrasa (Islamic school), countless food drives around Dhaka and PPE and masks to government hospitals. Right now we are focused on the double crisis – Covid-19 and the aftermath of the super-cyclone Amphan, which hit the southern parts of Bangladesh and washed away houses and crops and really devastated an already struggling people.
What next steps are planned?
On Eid weekend, we hosted an online fundraiser concert called Music Against Hunger 2020 It's funny, because ideally this would have been our greatest achievement as a team, our largest fundraiser and our most elaborate initiative. We tried something very ambitious - a live show (truly live, not pre-recorded and pretending to be live) using an extremely new technology (a platform called GoLightStream that was recently developed by an American startup) with high profile Bangladeshi musicians and Bangladesh's biggest companies as sponsors. Everything was on track to be a great show, with 10,000 people from around the world listening in - but alas, there was a huge error from the technical team on the day and the sound disappeared. We came away extremely dejected, and to be really honest, things have not been the same since. With an (untimely, may I add) easing of the lockdown in Bangladesh, the need for our activities has started to reduce but I think the failure and backlash of this failed project dampened our spirits. Right now, we still have our fundraisers running, and we are focusing on the Amphan activities in southern Bangladesh, but our wide-scale activities have reduced considerably.
Even so, we raised about £5000 from the concert itself (we were surprised too!), taking the total amount of money received and spent by RCNB in the past two months to about 30 lakh BDT (equivalent to £30,000).
Where can we find out more and support the initiative?
Gofundme
https://uk.gofundme.com/f/covid19-medical-equipment-to-doctors-in-bangladesh
Articles
https://tbsnews.net/panorama/feeding-people-hiding-shadows-83428
Group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/529040478046012/).
Concert
https://www.facebook.com/donate/2785080954954479/10156974595715653/ (all concert funds from OUTSIDE Bangladesh collected here)
https://choloshobai.com/campaign/music-against-hunger/ (a portion of concert funds from INSIDE Bangladesh collected here)
https://www.facebook.com/MusicAgainstHunger/videos/562360164717974/UzpfSTUxNTQ2NTY1MjoxMDE1Njk2ODg0OTAyNTY1Mw/ (I was one of the hosts and this is my promo video)
Acknowledgements
I give so much credit to the success of this to my friend, Mahia, without whom none of it would have been sustained and grown to the extent it did. Without hesitation, she gave out her personal phone number on all the publicly shared infographics and newspages, for all and sundry to call her whenever they wished. She speaks to every single person who calls her with kindness and patience and tries to help them in whatever way she can. She is holding the entire fort in Bangladesh on her own. I also commend her for how meticulously she handled all the initiatives, some which were sensitive (like the sex worker distributions), geographically tricky (like in the inundated areas post the super-cylone Amphan) or just the way she showed up and gave her all everyday. I am also immensely grateful to our various coordinators - Shoron Rahman, Mithun Das Kabbo, Ripon Mahmud, Humayun Ahmed and countless others who put themselves at risk everyday to leave their homes with minimal protection and deliver food and necessities to people in need. I am grateful for meeting Anik Bhai (the Texas gentleman) who has become a good friend and partner. I thank all the people who stayed up with us night and day, as we held meetings on 100 different time zones. There are so many people to thank, it is an impossible task. There are so many stories to tell, small interactions, big mishaps and failures, things that we will hold close forever. But I end here, with gratitude in my heart for what has been an extremely meaningful and enlightening journey. I do not know what is in store for RCNB in the future, but I hope it continues to exist and help people in whatever small way it has in the past few weeks.
