Mrs. Nane Annan, who accompanied her husband, Secretary-General Kofi Annan on his visit to Bangladesh 13 - 15 March 2001, was struck by the spontaneity of the street children, and the courage of the women entrepreneurs, who are beneficiaries in two separate UNDP-assisted projects.

The project ARISE (Appropriate Resources for Improving Street children’s Environment) has been in operation since 1998 in six cities under a partnership between the Government of Bangladesh and nine NGOs. Besides providing access to safe shelter, health services and counseling to the street children, the project offers vocational training and non-formal education to enable them to seek proper jobs and get off the streets.

Mrs. Annan visited the children when they were attending an open-air school for non-formal education where innovative methods are used to capture the short-attention span of such children. Mrs. Annan sat with the children and joined them in chanting out numbers and alphabets. She was moved by the spirited participation of the children and the smiles on their faces in spite of the hard lives they all led.

As she was departing she showed the children a picture of the Secretary-General which she was gifting to the school. When she asked if anyone recognised the face, several hands shot up and one little boy cried that he knew the face from TV newsreels but did not know his name. The information age had arrived even among street children of Bangladesh!

The Women Entrepreneurship Project (BGD/97/043), which is run by the National Women’s Association, provides loans of US$ 600 - 2,500 to women for operating small businesses. In the three years of its operation, the project has provided more than 2,600 women with loans averaging $700 each, with repayment rate of 93%. The project is operating nation-wide in 54 of the 64 districts of the country.

Mrs. Annan met a group of such women working in the city of Dhaka, They had brought samples of their products for her to see. The products ranged from cardboard boxes for pastries, sweetmeats, saris, and readymade garments, to toys, handicrafts, fancy candles, electrical fixtures, dresses and embroidered saris.

Mrs. Annan’s curiosity about the change these enterprises brought to the lives of the women was satisfied when the women candidly discussed the initial problems faced by many of them regarding the attitudes of their husbands and their mothers-in-law. However, as the benefits form their work permeated the entire households, such attitudes rapidly changed, and the women began to receive strong support from their families. In some cases, the husbands joined the small businesses, which helped the women to expand their activities much faster, hiring additional people and generating employment for poor women in the area.