Changing lives in disaster-prone villages

3 September 2011, 18:00 PM

Bss, Rangpur

Once a distressed housewife, Kulsum has now overcome poverty by adapting with climate change impacts in the remote Dhushmara Char village surrounded by the river Teesta under Kawnia upazila in Rangpur. Earlier, she was living miserably in abject poverty with her two sons as her husband Yunus was the sole earner of the family in the village which is prone to erosion, floods and natural disasters. Like some other beneficiary landless women, Kulsum achieved the success with the assistance of RDRS Bangladesh under its “Improving Community Coping Mechanism to Adapt with Climate Change” project. Ten landless families without assets including Kulsum got necessary assistance from the non-government organisation (NGO) in the hardly reachable and very low-lying village a coupe of years ago. Kulsum owns only 3.5 decimal of homestead and could not send her youngest son to primary school while her elder son stopped schooling due to poverty. RDRS Bangladesh extended assistance, showing Kulsum an opportunity of starting a new life by raising the base of her house for better shelter during floods. In ten days she raised the base by 3.3 feet from ground level and 1.2 feet from what the height of the water was during the last flood, costing her Tk 5,000. To enhance food security, she started gardening vegetables and planting fruit trees. For organic fertilisers, Kulsum established compost heaps in her homestead. She shifted her tube well to the raised homestead to obtain pure drinking water, sowed seeds of different vegetables and established a hygienic sanitary latrine to reduce water borne diseases. The NGO also provided her with two sheep on condition to donate the first offspring to another participant under the managements of the local “Farmers' Field School and Village Disaster Management Committee”. Now Kulsum rears her own cattle and poultry safely in her raised homestead. All these interventions were integrated in such a way so that eventually she made the best use of the scarce and tiny homestead for maximum production and income. Talking to the news agency, Kulsum said she believes she is now self sufficient.