Your contributions make a difference

Bluebell Primary School students 2024

In the last five years (2020-2024) Bangladesh Health Project received donations totaling many thousands of dollars. This is how the money was spent:

• The bulk of this funding was spent to build OfP Institute for Science and Technology (OIST), which opened in 2022. The initial batch of students, now studying Civil Engineering and Computer Technology, will graduate in 2026. OIST also hosts a health clinic where people suffering chronic illness can receive screening and referral.

• Donors also paid for small upgrades to Bluebell primary school, mostly for classroom furniture and teaching equipment as well as landscaping - and fencing to protect the landscaping from roaming cows and goats!

• A major on-going expense is salaries for teachers at Bluebell and OIST. Bluebell will always provide free tuition so this support will continue. OIST, however, charges tuition fees like all private colleges in Bangladesh. Currently, most OIST students receive grants or loans because they can afford only a portion of their fees. Over time, we expect OIST will be largely self-supporting.

• Bursaries for health care like cataract surgery and scholarships for poor students are a lesser expense but extremely important for the recipients.

BHP funds are raised from board members and generous donors around the world. You can donate here or for more information, please contact us.

Delivering health care with OfP

During a February visit to Balagram, BHP Directors John Richards and Alex Berland met with village residents to discuss their health care concerns. We learned that people with chronic illness were traveling long distances for medical care because local health care clinics were understaffed and sometimes unfriendly to poor patients. We asked OFP to explore ways to strengthen linkages with capable local GPs concerned about disadvantaged communities. We also requested OFP to arrange a specialist referral for a young woman with cerebral palsy symptoms whose family brought her to meet us. BHP funds some of the travel and accommodation costs to attend these specialist consultations as well as treatment costs for assessments and simple surgeries such as cataract repair.

The chronic illness (NCD) screening clinic is always well-attended

Our weekly chronic illness screening program continues in the clinic offices in the OIST building, using student volunteers. For three months in spring a local paramedic was also available, so he and an OIST student visited residents in their homes to screen for hyper-tension and diabetes. We used BHP health program funds to pay for the paramedic salary (about $350 CAD for  three months) and paid for a computer to maintain patient files in the clinic. We also asked OFP to improve access to good-quality health promotion videos and paid for a large-screen TV for the primary school.

If you would like to support these programs, you can donate here or for more information, please contact us.

Bluebell school assessment 2024

Bluebell classroom November 2024

Bluebell School is operated by Oasis for Posterity in Balagram, a small town in Nilphamari district. It provides 60 children with a no-fees education from pre-school to grade five (the terminal primary grade in most of South Asia). The school serves an adjacent social housing village for landless families, with additional students attending from the nearby town.

Donor contributions helped us buy a classroom TV for on-line teaching programs

Several times, we have assessed children's learning in the two key cognitive skills, reading and arithmetic. How to do it? Unfortunately, in both India and Bangladesh, official learning outcomes reported for government schools are either impossible to interpret or seriously biased. Two decades ago, Pratham, a large Indian NGO initiated very large – over 600,000 children – biannual surveys conducted in students' homes. To enable comparison – between Bluebell and Balagram students, and between these schools and Indian equivalents – we used a protocol similar to the ASER surveys employed by Pratham in India.

Previously, we have organized in-home surveys only for children living in the social housing project. In 2024, for comparison, we also surveyed public school students in Balagram, the nearby town. Recently, BHP Director John Richards published a summary of the assessment findings (link below) John’s report covers not only the Bluebell assessment results but also the survey protocol, comparisons with results in India using the same survey tool, the impacts of Covid shut-downs and parental literacy, and “learning poverty”.

RICHARDS Bluebell School Assessment 2024.pdf

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