Bangladesh

Sports for Hope and Independence (SHI)

Sports for Hope and Independence (SHI) is a social service organisation founded in 2016. SHI focuses on social development, providing sports and recreational activities to people in the communities where they work. This gives them an opportunity to play and grow.

SHI use football to address and tackle different social issues such as child marriage, gender equality, child & youth development, inclusion of person with disabilities, climate action and economic development.

ORGANISATION DETAILS

PARTICIPANTS

SHI works with mainly underprivileged communities and indigenous communities in Bangladesh such as rural villages, slum, street children and tribal communities

LOCATIONS

Dhaka, Moulvi Bazar, Hobiganj, Gopalganj, Bagerhat, Satkhira

Country statistics

133 out of 189 in Human Development Index rating (UNDP, 2019)

$2,620 Average annual salary per person (World Bank, 2021)

12.5% live in extreme poverty (World Bank, 2022)

Bangladesh is a country in Southern Asia between Myanmar (Burma) and India. The country has a population of 165.6 million, the 8th largest population in the world (CIA World Factbook, 2022).

15.5 million people are currently internally displaced in the country, due to natural disasters between 2008-2021 (Internal Displacement, 2021).

Climate change has caused increased flooding, this has led to widespread migration from the coastal areas to capital city Dhaka (Bloomberg, 2022).

In Dhaka, seven out of 10 households are living in unstable and insecure housing. The 4,000 informal settlements or slums in the city are home to some 3.5 million people. This number is continuously increasing as an estimated half a million people move to the capital every year (The Daily Star, 2017).

In 2019, The World Bank estimated that Bangladesh would need to build at least 8.5 million houses in the next five years to tackle the housing deficit (UNDP, 2019).

In addition to the internal displacement, Bangladesh also hosts almost a million Rohinga refugees who fled persecution in Myanmar. The Rohinga live in unstable housing in camps in the south-eastern part of the country and are campaigning to return to Myanmar (Al Jazeera, 2022).

The garment industry in Bangladesh faced international scrutiny over the safety of workers after the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka collapsed in 2013 killing 1,134 people.

5 million people in the country work in the garment industry, earning the lowest wages of any garment workers in the world (Guardian, 2019).