Well not quite home yet – but back in Dhaka. It’s funny how a city which last week felt so strange, poverty stricken and otherworldly, now feels quite familiar and prosperous.

Of course all these things are relative, but somehow it feels like the people I have met in recent days in rural areas, with no secure income or home are so much more isolated than people in cities. Of course there is great poverty in Dhaka, I haven’t been to the slums on this visit, but I know they are still there. But somehow there is a sense that you are at least connected with the outside world, and so there might be opportunities and communities to protect you.

Maybe its the ever present billboards (promising among other things 100% freedom from dandruff) which contrast with all the handpainted sign boards in the rural areas. Maybe it’s the mobile phones that are everywhere. Or maybe it’s the increased number of motorised vehicles. People are dressed differently – and it might be my imagination, but it feels like a happier place.

But then you could argue that poverty is worse in cities, because poor people tend to me more exposed to those with money than they do in the rural areas. People in Rangpur could go for weeks without coming into contact with people outside their own community, but in Dhaka you have to go through rich areas to get to poor areas and vice versa.

So which is worse? I don’t know and development academics will argue about it for an eternity. To the people at the sharp end it doesn’t matter anyway. The important thing is that we do everything we can to tackle the problem wherever we find it …

One of the people I met yesterday – Shahana is hoping that the good days are coming again. After thirty days without work, her husband, a casual farm worker, had gone to work that morning. For his efforts he will be paid 80tka which they can spend on food, or paying off the tab they have run up with the local shop during the lean period.

But Shahana isn’t complaining. In fact she is very happy, because for the first time in her life she has a secure place to live. Shahana is one of the people living in a special “cluster village” built by Practical Action to help people survive the annual flood disaster. This village, known as Salabhora, is just ten houses made out of tin, built on a special embankment which means they will be protected from the rising waters. There are two wells that they use to get clean water and there is one toilet for every two houses.

Shahana moved to the village when it opened 8 months ago. She was chosen by her peers in the local community, because she had no where secure to live with her husband and young baby, and because her husband has some mental health problems. She said that the best thing about the new village is that it gives her security, this means that her husband can travel further for work without having to worry about her because the villagers all look after each other.

It was great to end my last trip into the field with such a positive story. Although I have to say the peace of the village was very much shattered as we were leaving by the arrival of the Bangladeshi equivalent of an ice cream van. This bicycle has a cool box strapped to the back, and a loud speaker on the front playing Bangla music as loud as possible to attract the children. The white ice lollies which appeared cost only half a taka (slightly less than half a penny) and so are accessible to nearly everyone. Shahana’s baby isn’t old enough to appreciate ice cream yet … but it won’t be long.

Technological advancement is not always a good thing. It often excludes the poorest people. But yesterday I found a really innovative use of new technology. As I have mentioned before, at Practical Action we like to share our knowledge with people who can gain benefit from it. One of the main ways that we do this is through our technical enquiries service – Practical Answers.

Practical Answers is based on a number of different ways of working. We put lots of materials on our English language website, and we have sister websites in Spanish, Tamil and Sinhala. Materials in Bangla are due to be added soon, but internet access is still very limited in rural Bangaldesh and there is still a great preference for the spoken word.

So yesterday I visited a Gyaner Hat (literally “knowledge bazaar”) which we run in a High School in Barakhata. The school give us a room for free, and we supply a set up grant and pay the staff for a year to measure demand. From this centre a network of extension workers (mobile agricultural advisors) work, giving out advice to farmers far and wide. The extension workers earn money by offering services like pruning. The farmers gain invaluable knowledge. In this way up to 150 enquiries are answered every month.  I was able to visit one particular garden that had been created largely with the support of our team and was certainly looking very productive!

The technology comes in because an internet connection helps the extension workers to research their topic and keep up to date. And a series of videos have been produced and shown to more than 1000 farmers, giving them advice on everything from urinary problems in cows to mango tree pruning. One particularly gory video showed how to safely remove a cyst from a cow – personally I thought it was a bit of video nasty but it seems to have been popular with its target audience!

In another part of the world, the place I have been today could be described as paradise. The sandy lanes are lined by bamboo and banana palms. There is no traffic and the birds sing in the trees. The water of the lagoon laps against the embankment just below you. Sunshine and high temperatures virtually guaranteed. But this small area of north west Bangladesh was a long way from my idea of paradise.

I have been meeting the people that Practical Action is hoping to help through the Shiree project. As explained previously, Shiree is deliberately targeting the very hard to reach “extreme poor”. We are working with people whose lives have been ruined by the annual indundation of the Tista river. The homes of the people I have met cling to the embankment above the river like limpets on rocks. Every year their houses are flooded, and most of the people have already lost six or seven homes through the erosion caused by the river. The land the houses are perched upon is owned by the state, so it is free, which is why they are there.

The people that I have met, whose lives are dominated by nature, mainly earn tiny amounts of money working on the same land for local farmers. But it’s not enough for any of them. We usually reserve the word “starvation” for long lasting famines, but one person I met today, Rahman (not his real name) is 80 years old and goes without food for ten days every month. Everyone I met goes without food for two or three days at a time during the wet season.

At Practical Action we usually talk about how strong poor women and men can be. But the people I met today were generally very defeated and demoralised. Rahman said he was just waiting to die. There is a little hope on the horizon, with the Shiree project providing some income-earning opportunities. I really hope it works for Rahman’s sake and the 50,000 others we are trying to reach.

My last night in Zimbabwe – what from the visit will stick in my mind?

• My surprise at Harare and how different it was from my expectations – in many ways it is very beautiful
• Kids jumping in front of my camera whenever I went to take a photo – laughing and joking about
• People’s stories of how bad the situation was last year in the midst of economic turmoil and the cholera epidemic
• The consistent message that we have to look forward not back

I will also remember names – Breakfast, Dulux, Tryhard, Happiness. I will remember people working ceaselessly to make their communities better, to access clean water, to bring electricity to their schools, to grow food, look after their animals and above all care for their families. I will remember the bravery of the nurses who tackled and won the battle against cholera last year and linked to that our work on water and decent loos.

I will take with me memories of inspirational people – staff, our partners and the communities we support.

I will take laughter – there have been lots of things that made me smile. I will take saddness at some of the poverty I have seen.

And I will remember Shepherd’s words that Practical Action has brought joy.

I have enjoyed writing my blog – I will miss that too. Thank you for reading!

Margaret

Made it to Rangpur! It’s only about 250km north of Dhaka, but it’s a full day’s drive. The roads are pretty good, all tarmac, but the further north you come the more rickshaws, bicycles, carts, overladen buses and other slow vehicles you come across and so inevitably you make slow progress. I was here in time to meet the team who are responsible for our new “Shiree” project. Shiree stands for something long and academic in English, but no one can remember what! In Bangla it means “ladder” which is very appropriate.

Shiree is the initiative of the UK Department for International Development (DFID). It is a recognition that after several decades of pretty intensive anti poverty work in Bangladesh, there is still an “underclass” of people, who even the charities and the microcredit people have not yet reached. These are the most vulnerable people who, as in any society, tend to fall between the cracks and are difficult to find. DFID have asked six different charities, including Practical Action, to deliver a programme which really tries to target these most marginalised people or “extreme poor” as they are known. They hope these programmes will become models for replicating across Bangladesh and maybe elsewhere in the world.

Based on our previous experience in nearby Gaibanda, Practical Action is targeting people who live close to the river banks, and who have to move every year when the floods come as their land is flooded or eroded, then return to try and eke out a meagre existence on the sandbars that are left over. We are aiming to get 50,000 such people out of poverty for ever, within three years. At the moment every single household being targeted by the programme has an income of less than 2000 Bangladesh tka per month (that is a little under £20 for the whole household).

The training in pumpkin cultivation – which works well in the sand, and the short growing season – started yesterday. The team are very excited about the work and the challenges that it will bring – but confident that they can deliver. I’m looking forward to working with them over the next couple of days.

I’ve spent the day training Practical Action Bangladesh’s senior staff in communications planning. Which begs the question why? These people have their noses against the grindstone, spending every day working with people in desperate need. Why do they need training in marketing and communications? Aren’t there enough spin doctors in the world?

The short answer is a phrase used often at Practical Action, “scaling up”. It’s a difficult issue for an organisation founded on the principle of Small is Beautiful. But in reality we are ambitious to make a bigger impact. Our current plan is to work directly with 3 million poor women and men around the world over the next five years, which is admirable. But put in the context of 3 billion people living in poverty, it will take us a thousand years to achieve our ambition.

And so we are keen to take the lessons of our work and share them with others. We offer a free information service about appropriate technologies to any development practitioner in the world (see www.practicalaction.org/practicalanswers) . We talk to partner development organisations, locally, nationally and internationally about our lessons and how they can replicate our work. And we take the lessons of our work to politicians and donors, in the hope that they will change policies to make all development more effective.

All this makes sense to everyone who works for Practical Action. The staff on the ground in the countries are the critical players because we need them to capture and communicate what they learn. But they are also the people who are busiest and face daily pressing needs from the people they work with, so you can forgive them for not prioritising “the bigger picture”. It’s a real challenge but hopefully today’s training will equip them with tools to make their communication more effective…only time will tell!

I’ve discovered a major problem with micro-hydro sites – they are nearly all on very steep hills. As I am a big woman with bad ankles this is not a good combination. It got even worse today when it rained and the site involved near vertical, slippy slopes of red mud. I thought of my old stiletto shoes with their built in crampons and sighed over my worn smooth trainers. Fortunately Farai was a gentleman and helped me down – it would have been just too embarrassing for all if I’d slid down on my bum by accident or on purpose (a gentle sitting slide has on occasion been my transit of choice when faced with steep hills in the UK – while walking in the countryside you understand, not shopping on a sloping high street). Thank You Farai!

Today we crossed into Mozambique to see Practical Action work just the other side of the border. At the moment Mozambique is noticeably poorer than the neighbouring area of Zimbabwe, although colleagues tell me that a year ago it was a prime shopping area for Zimbabweans when their shops had nothing.

The approach here has similarities and differences with Zimbabwe – there is still the emphasis on getting electricity to schools and clinics, but more of the sites will be in private hands, with the ‘owners’ and users each contributing to a revolving fund which will then pay for maintenance and finance the further expansion of the project.

Again I spoke with people who are looking forward to having better education and healthcare, much shorter walks to grinding mills, lighting and TVs. I am not sure until this visit that I had recognised the importance of TV, whether individually or community owned. One woman I spoke to today told me that she went to bed each evening between 7 and 8 pm as there was nothing to do and so she tried to sleep after her evening meal and listening briefly to the radio – I calculate that she is getting between 10 and 11 hours sleep each evening. Lovely occasionally but pretty dire if you sleep so long only out of boredom.

The men in southern Africa all want to be able to have a TV in their communities in time for the 2010 World Cup. The women talk of educating their children and maybe relaxing.

So I made it! I have been to Dhaka once before, a decade ago. One of my most vivid memories from then, was repeated today with the absolute sea of faces pressed up against the outer windows of the arrivals area at the airport. It is a stark reminder of the density of Bangladesh’s population. Bangladeshis have a different attitude to personal space!

Having made the stupid, habitual, mistake of trying to put a seat belt on, only to discover that it doesn’t work (of course), we set off down the road in from the airport. You are quickly left in no doubt that poverty still challenges Bangladesh. Maybe it’s the random direction of the rickshaws and put-puts (motorised rickshaws), or the beggars that approach the car every time you slow down. Maybe it’s the vendors who risk life and limb weaving in and out of the traffic, or the kids riding on the roofs of the train. Maybe it’s the towering garment factories which line the airport road – which look almost derelict, but which are undoubtedly home to a hive of workers. Probably it’s a combination of all these things, but by the time you reach the Practical Action office, you already have a sense of the scale of the problem

Then you have to remind your self that the vendors and the garment factory workers can be the relatively lucky ones as they, at least, have an income. Later in the week I know we will be seeing people in rural areas who have less and are isolated from all possible opportunities. Just time today for a brief visit to the office and sit in on their monthly reporting meetings – as ever I remain staggered by the quantity and variety of work that we are involved with. Just strengthens my resolve that we need to be better at communicating it!

Last night for the first time in my life I went to bed by candlelight. The electricity supply was down and the generator failed at the guest house where we were staying. I have been to bed by torchlight many times, but as a one-off experience candlelight was much more atmospheric. 

Candlelight was an appropriate introduction to my work today.

Imagine a steep mountain. Imagine now that you have to dig a ditch half a metre wide all the way up the mountain in a completely straight line, when you have done that you have to lay a pipe in the trench, then build a house to protect machinery at the bottom, and for doing all of this you don’t get paid at all. In fact you have to supply many of your own materials, carrying them on your back or on your head for up to 15km until you reach the site – even if the material is a huge bag of sand.

You must want some thing very much to do that.

This is what the community I met today have been doing to get electricity to their school.

We don’t think of energy as a basic need, but in truth it is – 90% of the food we eat needs cooking, we need energy for light, heat, to keep medicines cool, we need it to stop the drudgery of the daily search for firewood and the millions of deaths caused by killer smoke.

Have you ever thought what it must be like not to have access to modern energy? Maybe Practical Action should encourage people to go without electricity for a day and be sponsored. I suspect most of us would be surprised at how difficult we would find it.

People without modern energy will go to extraordinary lengths to get it, as I witnessed today.

Mr Shepherd Mutihoto, the Deputy Head Master at the school, said to me, “We are a happy community that Practical Action has brought joy to by allocating to us a micro hydro system”. It was good to think that as well as tackling poverty we are bringing joy.