‘Paribartan’ stands for the Bengali word “Change”. Full name of this project-Changing lifestyle of disadvantaged women through capacity development. It aims to reduce inequality and poverty by providing life-skills training to disadvantaged, and poor women in the production of recycled goods, handicrafts, and their sale (old papers, pen, used rags, plastic, cloth waste, beads, jute, etc.). It is simultaneously contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals 1 & 8.

Paribartan won the EarthTalent Award in 2013 and was supported by the Bollore Group, based in France. This project was reinvestment of a youth employment generation project previously funded by the UNHABITAT Youth Fund. The activities of this project are purely practical and local resource-based as the target people were selected from the most vulnerable stage of urban slum youth aging between 18 and 35 who are surviving hardcore poverty and unemployment crisis and located in Mymensingh district of Mymensingh Division of Bangladesh. After an 11 month project, 50 young poor women learned to make envelopes with recycled papers, crafts like diaries, notebooks, photo frames, flowers, and showpieces.

Under Paribartan, SERAC-Bangladesh has engaged motivated local volunteers to coordinate the beneficiaries about the positive impact of the project. A training module was developed considering the diverse market demands of the goods being produced by the participants.

Paribartan has developed a relationship between the trainees and loan givers so they could raise their own enterprises. Again to ensure sustainability, SERAC will continue this training in different more urban slums.

The team:

Paribartan project is jointly managed by SERAC-Bangladesh’s Executive Director S M Shaikat and Bollore Group’s local venture SDV Bangladesh’s representative Mohammad Faridul Islam Bhuyan.