by Shahjahan Siraj

Created on: July 30, 2008   Last Updated: August 01, 2008

Countrywide 459 blasts in 63 districts within 30 minutes at August 17, 2005 have made a black scene in Bangladesh history. With this terrorism was involved mostly marginalized grassroots youth, are innocent believers and have no clear concept about the modern world, culture, faith and life style. General finding, this incidence is not cause but result. It happened, because Bangladesh could not educate and train these youth generation as universal minded that can encounter fanaticism, hateism and ignorance. The grassroots reality is that majority of rural people don't have minimum access to basic information; the youth and children are growing without knowing and live high risk of conflicts, HIV and degradation of human values with extreme poverty and insecurity.

"Our aim is to build an ICT-driven nation comprising a knowledge-based society by the year 2006." was the national commitment given by Bangladesh prime minister in December 11, 2003 shown a vision to nation particularly to youth. But the dateline has been passed; still now the nation is fighting with poverty, corruption and reaching to minimum standard of MDGs. Majority rural poor is not familiar with even newmedia terminology and development mottos. "Education for All", "Health for All", "Gender Equality" " Knowledge Based Information Socitey", " Unlocking the Potential" etc development" slogans yet could not overcome the formation level.

But since this decade the situation, particularly in urban and semi-urban areas has been changing tremendously by the emerging of mobile phone technology and unprecedented youth participation as user and entrepreneur. Bangladeshi youth now highly motivated and widely using the mobile phone. Amazing stats 70% mobile phone users are youth whom most favorites are innovative use of cell technology. The most important result is the country now connected and active in communication. However village and town now connected over GPRS and WiFi Internet service provided by the cell phone companies. The young girls are also empowered and have pride to overcome negative forces, dowry, domestic violence, acid attack, gender discrimination etc. Vast numbers of grassroots women particularly young girls are conscious and confidently running business as well. The unprivileged rural mothers now send children school and see vision for quality life.

This positive result happens by the continuous efforts of nationwide large number of NGOs, particularly by the group meeting and micro-credit

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