7th March 2012

New projects with UNDP / DFID in Dinajpur

Just last week Hathay Bunano, the makers of the Pebble brand, signed an agreement to train a further 200 women in Dinajpur. Dinajpur is in the far north of Bangladesh and takes about 10 hours to reach by road. We’ve been working successfully with the AB Foundation for 4 years and already employ 200 women artisans in that area. The agreement we’ve just signed is with the Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction programme (UPPR). You can see Achia and Mahmuda from the Dinajpur clusters signing the agreement in the photo here.

UPPR is the largest urban poverty reduction initiative in Bangladesh and one of the largest in the world. It’s goal is ‘to reduce urban poverty in Banglaesh’ and its purpose is ‘to improve the livelihoods and living conditions of three million urban poor and extremely poor people, expecially women and girls’. The total cost of the project is shared by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and UNDP.

Currently our centres in Dinajpur make the organic cotton bunnies and bunny rattles that were recently featured on the front page of the John Lewis magazine. The new centres will also learn to make these and in addition will learn to make the new caterpillar rattles and of course all the centres have to learn how to make the ever popular octopus rattles.

We are excited to be training more women to make more products for Pebble and create sustainable employment in these remote areas and I look forward to sharing with you photos of training as it gets underway next week and following the lives of the artisans who will start to work with Hathay Bunano.