92% of Bangladesh’s population lack access to formal healthcare.
Our community-based approach employs a wide network of frontline community health workers to ensure that people living in poverty can access quality, affordable health and nutrition services.
Health workers educate, create demand, offer services and connect communities with facilities. We deliver an integrated package of family planning, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health, nutrition, non-communicable diseases and eye care.
A key focus is maternal care, for which we employ a multi-faceted approach. We promote menstrual hygiene and provide access to reproductive and sexual health services, family planning and antenatal and postnatal care. Our maternity centres ensure safe deliveries.
We work with non-communicable diseases through promoting lifestyle change and conducting screenings, referrals and follow-ups.
We enable access to safe drinking water and hygienic sanitation, and educate on hygiene practices.
We develop WASH committees to identify community gaps, create demand through building awareness and hygiene sessions, and ensure supply by developing water and sanitation entrepreneurs. In secondary schools we provide messages on menstrual hygiene management, ensure separate female toilets with appropriate facilities and provide affordable sanitary napkins.
We follow a holistic, patient-centred approach from diagnosis to treatment and follow-up for TB and malaria in partnership with the government.
Our strategy incorporates modern tools and technologies for case identification, with the eventual goal of zero TB and malaria by 2030. Tackling communicable diseases include ensuring various preventive steps, from distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets to committing private healthcare providers to notify cases.
New social enterprise models for health and WASH give communities the ability to effectively invest in their own wellbeing. We are piloting several models in addition to our existing services, with the aim of realising our overall goal - quality, affordable care that leaves no one behind.
TAHIA TOUSHIN
I walked 2-3 kilometres from school every day for five years to use a washroom. The neighbours whose homes we would go to would get irritated. Kids would tease us as we stood in long lines outside the homes. I was always embarrassed. Everyone was. Every bathroom break was an ordeal. The boys would come too, making things more uncomfortable.
We got our first deep tube well In 2014. Our school is on a hill though, so it was still hard to access the water when we were at school. Finally, two years ago, a girls’ bathroom was built in the school. This changed everything. We no longer had to stand in line or go home dirty. We could wash up whenever we wanted. We did not have to carry water from home, which would warm up by the time we reached school.
I became part of the student brigade, along with six other classmates, and our job was to make sure that the bathroom was in functioning order. We changed soaps and kept the bathroom clean. Fewer and fewer girls miss school days now, and in general we are much much more excited about going to school. It now seems like a small thing to new students, but a washroom made the biggest difference for us.