We are in the middle of a very stimulating workshop with 14 Bangladeshi, Nepali and Norwegian students and award winning photographer Philip Blenkinsop. The workshop is the beginning of an extended exchange program where participating students will produce an in-depth photo reportage project.

Philip Blenkinsop has been described as “one of the most essential photographers of his generation” (Christian Caujolle). He is adamant that the photographer should never censor scenes through the camera. “Photographers are both witnesses and messengers. Our responsibility must always lie with the people we focus on, and with the accurate depiction of their plight, regardless of how unpalatable this might be for magazine readers.” His work, published in international arenas, has been the catalyst for much discussion and amongst other accolades was awarded Amnesty International’s Photojournalism prize for excellence in human rights journalism.

The 14 students participating in this workshop are; Arfun Ahmed Shawon, Benjamin Ward, Gyanendra Bhattarai, Ina Inglingstad, Labib Mohammad Sharfuddin, Md. Samsul Alam, Prakash KC, Prasiit Sthapit, Rajan Shrestha, Rajneesh Bhandari, Salma Abedin Prithi, Sapana Shah, Sindre Thoresen Lønnes and Tapash Paul.

It gives us great pleasure to invite you to join us for this special screening of the students’ and Philip’s works:

SATURDAY, 11th February @ Summit Hotel, Kupondol Heights

4:30 PM: My Asian Heart
My Asian Heart follows award winning photojournalist Philip Blenkinsop on assignment to China, setting up his next exhibition. Capturing Nepal during the pro democracy uprisings. And reflecting on the plight of the Hmong “survivors” who continue to haunt him. In Philip’s world there’s constant tension between his artistic commitments and the drive to report on world conflicts. The film is directed by David Bradbury.
[The Summit Hotel TV Room]

6:00 PM: Student Showcase
[The Summit Hotel Inner Courtyard]

7:00 PM: Philip Blenkinsop Showcase
[The Summit Hotel Inner Courtyard]

The workshop is part of an ongoing programme between Oslo University College in Norway and Pathshala. South Asian Media Academy in Bangladesh.
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www.photocircle.com.np

Five non-governmental organisations have admitted to the World Bank that they made corrupt payments to Bangladesh government officials to receive contracts under a bank-funded project.

The admissions are contained in a report of an investigation which the World Bank’s Integrity Vice President conducted into the disbursement to hundreds of NGOs of part of a $53.3 million loan that the bank had given the Bangladesh government to further post-literacy continuing education.

Four of the five NGOs told World Bank investigators that to get a contract under the project, which lasted between 2001 and 2007, they each had to pay at least Tk 100,000 in bribes to government officials, money that was channelled to the officials through intermediaries.

Some NGOs had to pay as much as Tk 600,000 in bribes to obtain a contract, the investigators were told.

The World Bank investigation report also found that almost half of 470 NGOs which government officials had selected to receive a contract ‘were found to be non-compliant with the qualification criteria’ and that at last 61 of the NGOs had falsified their experience certificates.

Iftekhar Zaman, executive director of Transparency International, told New Age, ‘This is a clear testimony to the concern that corruption has become deep and wide. While it cannot be concluded that everyone in the government and the non-government sector is corrupt, it certainly indicates that the win-win game of corrupt transactions is ominously eroding the moral and ethical fabric of society.’

‘This being in the education sector is tantamount to stealing both the present and future of the country,’ he added.

The investigation report has been made public as part of the new 2011 disclosure policy of the Integrity Vice President, the part of the bank which investigates corruption and fraud allegations concerning the use of the bank’s money.

The report does not publish the names of government officials alleged to have taken the money. The names of NGOs barred from bidding for World Bank contracts for a period of three or four years, some of them because of their fraud in this project, however, can be found separately in a database on the World Bank web site.

At least three of the organisations in the database — Samajik Sangha in Dhaka, Development Action Centre in Chuadanga and Bittohin Chasi Somaj Kalyan Sangstha in Pabna — were sanctioned because of fraud on this project.

The report on the World Bank project to fund post-literacy continuing education is the only investigation involving a Bangladesh project that has so far been published by the World Bank.

According to the investigation report, one NGO representative said, ‘All NGOs had to make payments to receive contracts under the project unless the NGO was well connected politically to senior GOB officials.’

A representative of another NGO, not amongst the five who admitted to paying bribes and referred to as F in the report, told the investigators, ‘No NGO, no matter how experienced, could win a contract without a minimum payment of BDT 100,000.’

The person is also quoted as saying that he had been told that ‘officials had to “make money” before contracts would be awarded.’

A representative of another NGO, referred to only as G in the report, told investigators that he knew of one NGO that had paid ‘a total of approximately Tk 2,00,000’ to get a contract while another paid about Tk 6,00,000.

The report said that ‘these two NGOs had [reportedly] made the payments to a number of GOB officials.’

The investigators also found that 202 of the 470 NGOs — 43 per cent of the total — that had been initially selected to participate in the final phases of the project did not satisfy the minimum selection criteria for receiving a contract.

The criteria included that the NGO had to have established premises, two years of experience in working on non-formal education and have trained managerial and technical staff in the area, have a constitution and managing body, and have experience in organising programmes for women and children.

The investigation also found out that at least 61 NGOs had submitted fraudulent experience certificates in their bid submissions.

‘These 61 NGO’s submitted… experience certificates purportedly issued by five established Bangladesh NGOs stating that they had performed work for one of more of [them],’ the report stated.

‘Collectively, the five established NGOs informed [the investigators] that the certificates submitted by at least 61 of the NGOs bidding for contracts under the project has been falsified and that these 61 NGOs had never done [non formal education] work for them,’ it went on to state.

The report states that the office of the Integrity Vice president requested each of the 25 NGOs which went on to receive a contract from the government to show cause why the organisation should not be sanctioned.

Six NGOs replied to the show cause notice by admitting that they had submitted falsified NFE experience certificates. Seven other NGOs replied by denying the stated findings but the World Bank ‘found their explanations and denials inconsistent with the available evidence.’

The remaining 12 NGOs never responded to the show cause notices.

In January, New Age disclosed that Bangladesh topped the list of countries with the highest number of organisations or individuals that had been sanctioned by the World Bank in the last three years.

In October 2011, the World Bank announced that it would not start disbursing the $1.2 million loan it had agreed earlier that year to give the Bangladesh government to fund the construction of the Padma bridge because of concerns about corruption and fraud.

Report on which this article was based

Pathshala, the South Asian Media Academy takes pleasure in inviting you to the presentation of Frank Fournier in Pathshala.

Frank Fournier is a French photographer. He originally studied medicine before becoming a photographer. He moved to New York and became a staff photographer at Contact Press Images in 1982 after joining the office staff in 1977. His portrait of Omayra Sanchez, a 13-year-old trapped under the debris of her home, won the 1986 World Press Photo award.

Frank is currently in Bangladesh to conduct a workshop on international reporting at Sylhet in the north east of Bangladesh. He is one of three international photographers, the others being Greg Marinovic (Kolkata), and Philip Blenkinsop (Kathmandu), who will be lead trainers in workshops involving photographers in Bangladesh (organised by Pathshala), India (organised by Drik India) and Nepal (organised by Photo Circle). Pathshala tutors Munem Wasif (India), Tanzim Ibne Wahab (Nepal) and Debashish Shom (Bangladesh) who along with Per Anders Rosenkvist of Oslo University College (OUC)  in Norway, will provide mentoring throught the workshop.

Pathshala has been actively collaborating with OUC for over six years, and students from Bangladesh, Nepal and Norway have been involved in exchanges supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Frank’s presentation follows talks by David Burnett (December 2011) and Pep Bonet (January 2012) and is part of the regular teaching programme at Pathshala.

The schedule of the presentation:

Date: February 04, 2012
Day: Saturday
Time: 6.00 pm
Venue: Pathshala (Room # 1)

Reportage on Wahid Adnan and Bangladeshi photojournalism on French Radio.

Le Bangladesh serait le pays où l’on trouve le plus de photojournalistes. Si c’est vrai, c’est en grande partie grâce à Shahidul Alam qui a lancé là-bas une école pour former les jeunes à la photographie. Pour que le Bangladesh se regarde dans les yeux, pour qu’on arrête de le regarder de loin, d’en haut. Pour ne pas laisser aux ONG le monopole de l’image. Rencontre avec Wahid Adnan, un jeune photojournaliste bangladais et avec son professeur, Shahidul Alam. Un reportage de Caroline Gillet

Pour voir les photos de Wahid Adnan – et sa série “Dhaka 9 to 5″:

Wahid Adnan © Wahid Adnan – 2012

Jashim Salam is a Chittagong, Bangladesh-based photographer working for DrikNEWS, an international news photo agency, since 2008. He is also studying photojournalism in The South Asian Media Academy and Institute of Photography. His work focuses on social documentary such as profiles of migrant workers, handicapped people, and climate-change refugees. His work has been published in The Sunday Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Better Photography, CNN, Photojournale, National Geographic online, Reuters, and many others. He is the recipient of many awards including the Jury Special Award in the 6th Humanity Photo Awards.

Aljazeera
Wed, 2012-01-11 03:55.

In the northwest Brazilian Amazon town of Brasileia, population 20,238, there are almost 1,200 Haitians.

They often mill around during the day, clustered in groups in the shade trying to keep cool from the steamy heat, waiting for weeks for their work documents to be processed so they can get a job in another part of Brazil.

But on Tuesday it was the two other guys sitting alone who caught my attention. They could have been Bolivian perhaps, or even Brazilian. But I knew they weren’t.

“We are from Bangladesh,” AHM Sultan Ahmed, 36, tells me with a smile when I approach and ask to talk with them.

His friend, Abdul Awal, and my photojournalist, Maria Elena Romero, and I, all sit together on the grass and begin to chat.

They are from Dhaka, and arrived in Brasileia the night before. They slept on the ground in the main plaza, having nowhere else to go. For obvious reasons, they look tired, but still muster the energy to smile wide and often.

Why did you come to Brazil?

“I heard Brazil’s economy is growing, and that here is good for us and good jobs,” Ahmed says. “Soon we can hopefully get our papers and find a job. I am happy”

“I think there is a lot of work in South America now, and a lot of people from my country are wanting to come here now,” he continues.

Neither has been to Brazil before, nor speak a word of Portuguese.

Ahmed tells me he is a trained painter and once worked in Greece. Awal, who worked in Malaysia, is an electrician.

Both men say they need work to support their families back home. Ahmed left behind a wife and seven-year-old daughter; Awal a wife and one daughter and two sons.

Long, Dangerous Journey

I just had to ask: So how do two men from Bangladesh get to one of the most remote corners of the Amazon in Brazil?

First, they tell me, they paid about $9,000 to a broker to arrange the journey. The trickster also promised easy and high-paying jobs in Ecuador.

So Ahmed and Awal paid up and flew from Dhaka to Dubai (4 hours, 30 minutes).

“Why not just work in Dubai,” I ask.

“Not much work, Brazil is better I think,” Ahmed says.

In the UAE, they boarded a flight that brought them non-stop from Dubai to Sao Paulo. It’s about a 15-hour flight.

Because they didn’t have a visa for Brazil, when they landed in Sao Paulo they could not leave the airport, and had to transfer to another flight to Santiago, Chile (3 hours, 15 minutes).

After a long layover in Santiago, another flight to Quito, Ecuador, (5 hours) where they stayed a few days.

“No work for us in Ecuador,” Ahmed says.

So they sharpened their focus on Brazil, a country recently named the world’s sixth largest economy by a consulting firm.

But because they didn’t know the logistics how to get to Brazil without a visa, they were forced to pay $5,400 to another “middle man” who basically said: ‘It’s complicated, but don’t worry, I’ll arrange it all.’

Border crossing

Soon they found themselves on a public bus for a 26 hours journey from Quito to Lima, Peru. From there they transferred to another bus, and another 12-hour journey over mountain passes to Inapari, Peru, a dusty border town with Brazil.

Still with no visa for Brazil, and in a far away land and culture they didn’t know, another local shady character demanded $600, they say, to secretly drive them to the Bolivian side of the border and then guide them the few kilometres through the jungle into Brazil.

But the two men only had $300 in cash left. So the man asked for Ahmed’s cellphone to cover the rest. Having no other choice, he handed it over.

Yesterday, 21 days after leaving Dhaka, the two men straggled into Brasileia.

Ahmed had $20 in cash, and a few loose coins in Brazilian money. And no cellphone to call home.

They bought a snack and some water to celebrate their arrival.

“We have $10 now,” he said.

They delivered their passports to the local federal police offices for processing for a work permit.

But the two men had better get used to Brasileia.

The wait time is averaging four weeks.

Cultural Shock

As I am sitting on the grass talking to my two new friends from Bangladesh, a good-natured, middle-aged Brazilian man comes by and asks us where we were from. “They are from Bangladesh,” I say.

Probably not knowing where to take the conversation from there, he resorts to a well-tested, male fall-back: “You have beautiful girls over there?” he says, laughing.

When that doesn’t solicit much of a response from Ahmed or Awal, the Brazilian concedes: “Bangladesh is the capital of India, right?”

Mr. Ahmed smiles gently.  “India, Pakistan, Bangladesh …,” trying to help the man place it on his mental map of the world.

“Nossa senhora,” the Brazilian says, before taking off to continue his jog.

It is a quick and dirty geography and cultural lesson between two unlikely people in the most improbable place imaginable.

But this isn’t the first time.

When I was in the neighbouring town of Epitaciolandia in May, working on stories about Haitians coming to Brazil, I also met a group of four men from Bangladesh who migrated to Brazil looking for work.

New trend

It appears to be a new and growing trend of east to west, south to south migration. At least from Bangladesh to Brazil.

“When you get your work papers, where will you go?” I ask Ahmed.

“Maybe Sao Paulo, but I would like Brasilia,” he says.

While the Haitian migrants in Brasileia have each other to support, Ahmed and Awal do not. They are on their own, in a very different universe now.

I ask Ahmed if he misses his family.

He looks down towards the grass, and then back up again to my eyes, and says: “Sure, of course, I must go back at some time.”

His eyes are red, but I am not sure if it is because he is about to cry, or just from 21 days of travel around the world.

I decided not to push the issue.

“Good luck, my friends,” I say, as we all exchange handshakes. “Hope to see you tomorrow. And welcome to Brazil.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you so much” they reply back, smiling.

Undocumented migrants from Bangladesh in a far corner of the Brazilian Amazon looking for work to support families on the other side of Earth.

Yes, the world is changing. Fast. Stay safe, gentlemen. Good luck. And may you both achieve your Brazilian dream.

Photo story on Bangladeshi migrant workers

My Journey as a Witness

Shahidul Alam in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote

Goa Arts and Literary Festival Dec 17-21

2011-11-25

The 2nd Goa Arts and Literary Festival is meant to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Goa’s liberation after 451 years of colonial rule. It will reflect on the idea of India as reflected through the perspective of cultures, communities and writers of the country. It is hosted by the International Centre Goa from December 17-21.

The festival will touch upon Diaspora, on the Goan and other Indian migrant communities across the world which retain different ideas about what being Indian means; North-East of India and its art, music and literature. The festival will celebrate music, painting and photography, poetry, journalism and publishing, debates, discussions and book-releases: from 17-21 December. Local, national and international delegates will be attending.

Exactly 50 years after the historic days when Indian troops conquered, and annexed Goa. It was another dramatic moment in history for this tiny territory. Each day of the Festival will recall 1961, featuring historians and witnesses to the sensational events as they occurred, as well as lectures, special book releases, and panel discussions about the Goan experience of the Estado da India, quite different from much of the rest of the subcontinent’s experience with the British Raj.

The 2011 Goa Arts and Literary Festival will celebrate creative excellence across India, with a special focus on Goa and its Diaspora. As with the inaugural edition, there will be prominent daily showcases for the best contemporary poetry from across India, and for the extraordinary writers and musicians of the North East.

Events such as this Festival will be held annually so that the quality of the Festival is enriched and enhanced every year by involving more and more people and their ideas and the image of Goa in people’s mind is of a more vibrant cultural and intellectual destination.

Participating Authors:

Aatish Taseer, Abhay Sardesai, Amitav Ghosh, Anand Patwardhan, Anjum Hasan, Aniruddha Sen Gupta, Bhalchandra Nemade,Bilal Tanweer,Charles Correa,Chiki Sarkar, C P Surendran, Cyril Almeida, Deborah Baker, Desmond L Kharmawphlang, Eunice de Souza, Fatima Bhutto, Gulzar, H M Naqvi, Jai Arjun Singh, Jeet Thayil, Jerry Pinto,Jonathan Shainin, Kiran Nagarkar, Kjell Eriksson, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Manohar Shetty, Mamang Dai, Meena Kandasamy, Mitra Phukan, Mohammed Hanif, Mridula Garg,M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Naresh Fernandes, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, Pablo Bartholomew, Pavan K Varma, Raghunath Mashelkar, Ranjit Hoskote, Robin Ngangom, S. Anand, Sadia Dehlvi, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Samar Halarnkar, Sidharth Bhatia, Shahidul Alam, Shailaja Bajpai, Shehan Karunatilaka, Sheen Kaaf Nizam, Sivasankari, Sonia Faleiro, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Sunil Khilnani, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Urvashi Butalia,Temsula Ao,Teju Cole, Vishwas Patil, Zac O’Yeah

Participating Artists and Performers:

Dr. Alka Pande, Atul Dodiya, Durgabai Vyam, Gulam Mohd Sheikh, Himanshu Suri, Lou Majaw, Luis Gumby Pinto, Subhash Vyam,Dr. Subodh Kerkar, Suresh Jayaram, Suresh Jayaram, Vijay Iyer