BHP spends your money wisely

A recent article from Your World in Data explains what makes charities effective: simply put, they can do a lot with relatively little money. According to external evaluation, “Charities that achieve [a high] level of cost-effectiveness do quite different things [but] they have two things in common. They all focus on the world’s poorest people, which makes sense as $1,000 makes a much larger difference to someone who has very little. They also all tend to focus on causes that don’t receive much public attention. That makes sense, too — for the causes that receive the most attention, all the lowest-hanging fruits have already been picked.”

BHP uses all donations to support its health care and education activities in Bangladesh, mostly in an impoverished agricultural district in the country’s north-west. In addition to making program contributions for teacher salaries and equipment, BHP Directors pay for BHP overhead costs and for their own travel expenses to oversee the projects. This means that your donations are spent entirely in Bangladesh. Please contact us for more information or donate directly through Canada Helps.

Education priorities

BHP Director John Richards along with colleagues Manzoor Ahmed and Shahidul Islam recently published an op-ed on education reforms in Bangladesh’s leading English-language newspaper. They recommend urgent and short-term actions to return to a “new normal” with effective consultation processes to engage students, families and teachers. In the medium-term, they propose, “Teachers' professionalism and performance are the pivot of change in education.” They also propose increased education budgets; meaningful assessment of student learning; decentralized management, and involvement of industry experts to ensure graduates have the right skills. This is an ambitious agenda and the authors conclude, “The interim government is not expected to complete all the needed reforms. But if it realizes at least some of the key reforms and charts the way ahead for others, it will have done justice to the sacrifices of students and citizens during the July-August movement.” You can read about BHP support for primary education in our earlier blog posts.

IUBAT graduate at RCOG Congress

IUBAT College of Nursing graduate and faculty member Mohammed Ali attended the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists World Congress in October 2024, along with 2000 other participants from over 70 countries. He presented a poster on decision-making for C-section in Bangladesh. Ali writes, “I had the opportunity to meet people from many places, who liked my e-poster and the topic that I am researching. I was also able develop professional networks with people involved with Bangladesh Obstetrician and Gynecologists Society and look forward to working with them in the future. My supervisor from Oxford University was there as well and glad to find a local examiner for my thesis defense. Overall, it was a great conference with so many innovative research papers on the theme of women's and reproductive health. I found it very useful.”