Dhaka’s buses are often unmarked, and very people know where they go. A new project is sending riders on them with GPS devices in the hopes of making the city’s first transit map.
Read More »
How is it that some very well intentioned nonprofits that do good work will return home after CGI with little more than fond memories, while others will leave with their pockets full to do more good in the world? The best way to answer this question is to tell the story of BRAC.
One of the most crowded and polluted cities on the planet, Dhaka might not seem like a place for a massive new clean development. And yet, Green Leaf--a new “sustainable garden city”--is currently under construction there.
Founded in 1972, BRAC reaches 138 million of the poorest people in nine countries in Asia and Africa. Its mission is to empower people and communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and social injustice. Its annual operating budget is half a billion dollars.
My mother and father had me marching for peace. I was just a few months old in my mother's arms. My parents, wearing long hair and chanting songs, like remnants of the '60s, spent 1971 doing what they could to put an end to a civil war and help a new state--Bangladesh--emerge as independent.
It's been a couple of years since I last visited Peru, and more than five since I had an apartment in Chile, and these gaps highlight an unmistakable trend. The center of the world is shifting from the developed to the developing world.
A couple weeks ago in Bangladesh, while staring out at the frenetic street pace from my car window, I saw a crowd slowly strolling behind a white-haired dreadlocked man. He may be, it turns out, the Forrest Gump of South Asia. You see, this old dreadlocked man marches every day.
