Empowering girls were my biggest challenge with Seats2meet, Bangladesh location. It took me almost 2 years to start meetups with girls.
Why it’s a big deal? Why I am so excited about the fact that girls are joining and learning things together with everyone?
The fact is we are a Muslim majority country with pure Islamic influence in our culture. Girls are not always allowed to go outside and do activities as a man can do. It is not extreme laws here in countries like Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan but it is here somewhere. All these cultural barriers are killing us.
When I started Seats2meet back in 2019, I had seen some curious girls who want to join our location but their parents strictly told them not to join any random things run by a boy. Though I started with 2 girls anyway. It didn’t sustain. Girls stopped coming because of less company and they feel shy to sit around with boys.
After one month or so of starting, we only had a meetup with boys and all my buddies were learning several cool things. But I was not fully happy about the fact that many girls are not here learning things. I do believe that empowering women is the best step toward ultimate development where 50% of our citizens are women. Also, whenever I used to post about my activities on the Seats2meet, magazine, people used to tell me, “Why there are no girls?”
So I start going home to home to convince parents about the importance of learning technology and leadership. A man stood up and said, “Yes, I am gonna send my daughter to learn computer and technology, this is important for coming days”. He is not educated at all but had the thought. We together then start talking to parents and people starts getting it. I take all the responsibilities in case anything happens.
Now we have 8 members of girls team learning computer 4 days a week. Girls are loving the VR thing. They discovered the VR world for the first time.
We are planning a festival together. My festival plans are not working due to lockdown and so on.
I wanna make a dedicated section for girls where there will be a leader who teaches things to the newcomer and convince other girls to join. We will then start a campaign here and there (when the covid thing will be fine) for women’s awareness with the girls. A girl talking to a group of girls is much different than I talk to them. They can connect with each other pretty quickly.
I have many more ideas and plans to work on and we need your help. If you think we are doing good things in the poorest and remote village in Bangladesh then you can help us through Patreon.com/s2mBD. Patreon.com is a platform where people support creators and social entrepreneurs with monthly or one-time help as low as 5 euros per month or whatever amount you wanna put and you can cancel anytime if you like to. I have one supporter right now the founder and CEO of Seats2meet MR.Ronald van den Hoff.
I can convert your help for good causes and many youth boys and girls will be benefited and we all can make a better world.
Thank you for reading.
I will come up with more blogs for our activity.
Fahad Bin Husne Ali,
Location manager,
Bukabunia, Bangladesh.
