Every so
often I come across an idea put into practice that is so blindingly
obvious that I kick myself for not having had it first. So this week,
Dear Reader, we go to Bangladesh and meet the ‘info-ladies’. Firstly, I
have to admit it was not in this newspaper that I spotted this, but no
matter because this is about the idea itself as much as the story.
The
Bangladeshi ‘info-ladies’ do any number of useful things. They own and
ride their own bicycles for one, and carry a laptop in the luggage
basket for another. They cycle out – yes, women on bicycles, doing a job
of work, earning an honest living – to remote villages and set up shop.
Essentially they are a mobile internet cafe without the sleaze.
They
connect rural women to working-away husbands via Skype, allow
schoolchildren access to social media and let ordinary people use
e-government services in ways they never could before. They can write
complaints, fill in forms and generally engage in the IT revolution, all
courtesy of the ‘info-ladies’.
Typically the woman with
the bike and the lappy comes from a rural middle-class family, is a
graduate and hitherto jobless. They get a three-month training course,
which includes some very basic health care. They can test blood-sugar
levels and take blood pressure for instance; and get a business start-up
loan interest-free to buy the basics – laptop, printer, bike – from the
Bangladesh Central Bank, and then it is up to them to make the business
pay. The service they offer is not free, their customers pay to talk to
far-off relatives or chat on Facebook, and the loan has to be repaid.
This
is not charity, a freebie or a handout. Independence is encouraged and
fostered; women are empowered and enter a workplace niche that before
the ‘info-ladies’ never existed.
Now wouldn’t that be a
good idea in Pakistan, I thought. It would, given that our internet
services now have virtually blanket coverage across the country, even in
the most remote areas. It would, and need not be aimed at graduate
young women (or even older women, why not) but could be a job
opportunity for matriculates and taught as a new subject in the women’s
vocational colleges that dot the country. None of this is rocket science
and all of it is possible. There are even thousands of women who have
recently been gifted a laptop from which pool our very own ‘info-ladies’
might be recruited. But this is Pakistan.
This is the
Pakistan where a mother and father burned their daughter to death with
acid last week because she was believed to have spoken to a boy. That
has government ministers offering head-money to anybody who would kill
the maker of an obscure blasphemous film-clip. Where teenage girls get
shot for advocating female education.
The ‘info-lady’
concept is wonderful in its simplicity. By 2016 Bangladesh hopes to have
16,000 of them and there is no reason to think that goal will not be
achieved. Having that number of women working in rural communities
really does make the ‘info-lady’ a game changer; it institutionalises
knowledge and information transfer across the literacy and poverty
divide and grows netizens in the villages.
My natural
scepticism aside, could it be doable here in Pakistan where seeing a
woman ride a bicycle beyond her early teens is a rare sight indeed?
Would the men of Pakistan be able to cope? I suspect they would not,
which is one of the reasons why Bangladesh is not failing as a state
whilst we hover eternally close to the abyss.
The writer is a British social worker settled in Pakistan. Email: manticore73@gmail.com