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Throwing a Lifeline

By Efrit Karim

The story of a lady starting with nothing to a turnover of 50 lakhs in three years, dodging social and domestic hindrances, while she is resolutely standing in as a blessing for distressed souls, reads indeed like a fairytale! Woman leadership receives a crucial impetus like never before due to such individuals.

Esrat karim Eve was born and raised in Bangladesh and acquired her degree from the University of Dhaka in finance. She dreams of a world where everyone has free access to education and a better life. She is working to empower street children out of poverty by leveraging education. Her school and college was in Bogra, a small city. Though a small-town girl, she began to dream big.

Through her itinerary to success, we get a glimpse of how she has been able to reshape her dream in succession. After her graduation she moved to the USA for further studies. She completed her Master’s from the University of Colorado in “Entrepreneurship and social business”. She entered the professional world with a high-profile job but she always wanted to do something for her country. Esrat recalls, “I was working at a well paid job and was well settled, but I was not happy. Because I always wanted to serve my country and had this strong desire to come back.” This desire at a crucial point of time of her life made her rethink her future course.

She finally made her audacious move, she came back to Bangladesh. However, it was not as facile as it now seems. “I had to face all the conventional pressure since my family had no clue what I was doing,” she remembers. Consequently, after a year she decided to start her own non-profit with her remaining 20 thousand bucks, and developing an organization was not a piece of cake. There were too many challenges. But fortunately, she had some good friends and kinsmen who stood by her, buttressed her to launch Amal Foundation.

Esrat karim Eve is the founder director of Amal Foundation. “Amal” stands for Authentic Method of Alternative Learning. Amal came from the Arabic word which stand for hope. The enterprise had a humble beginning with very small projects and initiatives as their starting point. They began to provide healthcare support to approximately 150 children in the starting year. Esrat’s desire was to swell Amal into a big platform, but she did not know how to make it happen right at that point. Eventually she met the people who helped her in her strides. Her passion, compassion and perseverance were the assets that also worked in the favour of this new platform — now Amal is reaching toward its peak.

Amal has supported more than 550 underprivileged children since 2011. It’s been exactly three years. They have now more than seven projects. Working on four issues — health, education, empowerment and emergency crises, people at Amal consider them four crucial pillars.

They have worked in the remote char areas, parts of Bangladesh isolated from the rest. Distress is an everyday reality there, since people are living in extreme poverty. At such location they have planned and executed several projects. They have built the very 1st schools, provided livestocks, supported the rural char women by distributing sewing machines and so on. Still they are following up with them, empowering them by giving various trainings and mental support as well. Besides, they have other projects in slum areas in Dhaka where Amal runs school-based health program to ensure health care support as well as distribute medicines share knowledge about nutrition. They take measures for counseling especially for victims of sexual harassment, and also for children entering puberty in the slum areas. So, these are the projects focused on mental and physical health.

They also devised projects to respond to emergency crises. These projects are mostly to help people affected by natural calamities. They have worked on flood-affected areas. Sirajgonj, Bogra, Sunamgonj and Dinajpur are regions they have so far been able to penetrate. Amal provided relief which helped the masses to survive the extreme flash flood.

Esrat gives an example of their recent effort, “Right now we are working at Teknuf in the Rohingya refugee camps. We are building model villages, mosques, orphanages as well as building water pumps and sanitation projects.” Moreover, in Rohingya camps they are doing “hot food project” where they serve three meals a day since the refugees don’t have proper utensils, raw ration and burners.

With great satisfaction and gratitude Esrat says, “I am really honored to let you know that we have national as well as international partners in the USA, UK, Nepal, Canada, etc. They have come across to lend a hand and now we are working together to make this country a better place to live as far as the masses are concerned.”

Though the journey is a delightful one, it comes with its specific challenging too. “It has been the most beautiful and inspiring journey of my life,” says Esrat.

There are 12 people in Amal team who are working as full timers and around 450 volunteers all over the country — they are there to serve the cause of the humanity. Esrat reflects, “When I along with my team go for field work and get to see the beautiful people whom we are working to raise a smile that is the time we feel that it is worth the pain, the struggle and the challenges.”

People used to ask Esrat after studying finance, doing her Master’s from the USA, why did she decide to come back? She benevolently answers, “I would say studying in finance, even having my Master’s in social entrepreneurship are all small tools which actually helped me to equip myself with the necessary skills so that I could be a good entrepreneur. And what I personally feel is that in Bangladesh we have a scarcity of strong, empowered woman. So, I really want to inspire more woman through my work while I would like to create a difference in the lives of those vulnerable people who have lack of opportunities and want a fair chance in life to grow and thrive.”

Amal is a story of success in which inspiration and motivation are woven together. Esrat Karim Eve is the idol who remains enamored of her work for humanity. Under her guidance Amal is growing like a tree from a sprout, which explains that the right moves always gives you fruitful results.

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