E-motive learning exchange, from Bangladesh to India

As part of an E-motive trajectory where, from 16th until 26th July, the learning group of the Bangladesh country team visited Barefoot College, READ Centre, and the Honey Bee Network in India. At the end of their visit they made an action plan, how to implement their learnings in Bangladesh.

Topics for solutions
To make the rural Hubs successful and sustainable for young people is a complex challenge. The Hubs need to become youth-friendly, provide tools to create job opportunities, and become a community space. E-Motive therefore looks into solutions for four broad topics.

• Safe mentoring & peer learning models
• Safe mobility
• Job creation tools
• Community space creation

Learnings

Toma Rani Saha, junior project leader for Empower Youth for Work.: "I have a big list of learnings. I would like to mention a few things. The first thing is community ownership. If we want to sustain something of community living, we need to ensure the ownership of the community people. We need to talk with the community people. We need to involve them in the decisions. We need to make a committee of community people. Community ownership is very important for any kind of activity if you want to make it sustainable.

Another thing is, in rural areas what we think that women are not for so-called 'productive work', most of the people generally think of. But with Barefoot College we learned that women are not only for household and care work. They are also for technical professions. Another thing that I learned is that recognition is very important. We have some traditional knowledges, and youth sometimes do not know how important that is. It would therefore be good if we can collect these knowledges and protect them. It is very important to recognize them."

Until the return visit, the learning group will transform their learnings from India into practices in their local projects. In November the experts of Barefoot College, READ Centre and Honey Bee Network will visit the learning group to see what has been achieved so far, and help to implement the solutions further.

Learn more about the E-motive learning exchange between Bangladesh and India