About a year after Sayed Asif Mahmud began hanging around Bangladesh’s bidi factories to document those who make the hand-rolled cigarettes with low-grade tobacco, a cheap and popular alternative for pre-packaged ones across southeast Asia, he stopped. “I’m always in a dilemma with whether I’m the right person to tell someone else’s story,” he tells TIME. “Why am I doing this? For me or for them?”
[caption id="attachment_8250" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Two women remove dust from thrashed tobacco in a factory. Rangpur, February 2008.[/caption]
That was in late 2008, as he was finishing h...
Kerry Kennedy
People love freedom so much that they have withstood great armies, famine and intractable poverty.
Visiting Bangladesh has been a lifelong dream of mine, but all that I had heard about a people who love freedom so much that they have withstood great armies, famine and intractable poverty could not prepare me for what I’ve seen in the last three days.
The Bengali patriots’ courage and endurance in the face of the Pakistani army forty years ago is the stuff of legend in our family...
Bangladesh might be better known for natural disasters and human suffering, but for years this south Asian nation has been a kind of Silicon Valley in the field of social entrepreneurship and anti-poverty programs.
It is the birthplace of BRAC, the world’s largest non-government organization that’s helping survivors of the 2013 Bangladesh factory collapse, and Grameen Bank, better known in the West since winning the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
However, the success of Grameen and BRAC is still dwarfed by the sheer scale the economic and environmental problems faced by this crowded, low-lying nation of 150 million. So the challenge for behemoths and start ups alike is to scale up — not just to have a wider social impact but also to sustain the enterprise so it depends less on charity.
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Last week, at the invitation of my friend Muhammad Yunus, I traveled to Bangladesh, a truly humbling and inspiring experience. I met so many incredible people struggling to improve their country and their lives. I wrote a letter to my daughters about my travels, which follows:
Dear Cara, Mariah and Michaela,
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Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center (third from right), with Grameen Bank members.[/caption]
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In April 2013, a horrendous collapse of a rickety garment factory in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 workers. The year before, fire swept through another, killing 117 people, and despite such tragedies, improvements in that country’s garment sector have been few and far between.
The reality is that capitalism and globalization have given Western consumers cheap goods and helped emerging economies grow, but that’s usually done through the exploitation of workers and the environment. Shop floor co...
India’s iconic Taj Mahal monument is to be given a mud-pack to remove yellow pollution stains, archaeologists say.
The treatment is hoped to restore the natural sheen and colour of the white marble monument.
It will be the fourth time the 17
th century mausoleum has had the treatment.
The last mud-pack was applied in 2008, but pollution levels around the monument to love remain high and officials say it needs cleaning again.
The Taj Mahal sits on the bank of the Yamuna River, at the city of Agra in India’s northern s...
