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Dr.
Julia Ahmed
Deputy Executive Director
BWHC
BWHC is incepted in 1980 with a dynamic leadership from our founder president Sandra Kabir, who has ensured the strategic direction of the organization through her visionary guidance. From the very beginning we have started our journey with a mission to bring quality changes in the reproductive health status of woman. This is to enabling women to flourish with full potentials and to lead quality healthy life for her and her family. This mission succinctly captures the aim, determination, hopes and aspiration of the organization. If we look at the chronology of our journey we can find that we have not been deviated from this endeavor. Allow me to cite few examples in support of this submission. Being started with one clinic and one service, we could soon successfully pioneer a service delivery model that has helped to break the status quo i.e. freeing 'Women Health' concept from the branded MCH (Maternal & Child health) program. We could come up with an integrated comprehensive health service delivery model which have allowed woman to avail a wide range of services for her and her children with full information, dignity and informed choices. This model could shed specific light on the importance of increasing women's mobility and accessing them with information resource. During the whole process we have been challenged not only with questions of what services should be provided from our health facilities but how? Our continued determination to see 'women health as a development issue' and firm adherence to our priorities has also been passed under reality checks. Like, over the years we have got periodic feedback and inputs from external evaluations and internal strategic planning workshops. Accordingly, our major focus on Menstrual Regulation service, Safe Motherhood, Family Planning, RTI/STI/AIDS, Adolescent Health, Integrated Childhood Disease Management and Community Based Behavior Change Communication strategies, Developments of Community Health Volunteers have been sharpened over the years.
Currently, the organization runs 29 health centers at rural, semi urban and urban locations. We cover five administrative divisions with the coverage of ~ 1.3 million direct beneficiaries. Our journey with the delivery of reproductive health services has been evolved over the years by bringing incremental changes with women empowerment, men's productive participation in reproductive health matters, human rights & advocacy dimensions. This can be seen as our responsiveness to the attainment of the goals of ICPD, Beijing Platform of Action, and health sector reform process through Health Nutrition and Population Sector Program (HNPSP) in Bangladesh. Our Rural Reproductive & Sexual Health Program, Urban Primary Health Care Project, Integrated RTI/STI/HIV/AIDS, Adolescent health program, Older Women Health Project have been remained vigilant to translate the policies and concepts of reproductive & sexual health into action at grass root level.
Highlighting our mission we have found that along with our health service delivery components there is a definite need to link our activities with the local power structure so that we can facilitate greater public awareness on women health and rights issues. On this ground, we are convinced that certain functional modalities need to be worked out to involve the local government, and elected bodies, particularly women representatives. So, the voice of women can take to the center stage. And, more importantly, a space would be created to help community to own and internalize the problem of entrenched patriarchal attitudes and the important role it can play to overcome this. Within this understanding, we are gradually preparing our technical & absorptive capacity on this. Within this approach we are looking forward to give quality inputs to the attainment of health related PRSP recently passed by Executive Committee of National Economic Council and MDGs.
At this juncture of our life cycle, we are confronting a challenge of how to connect adequately what we know and how we act. One of the critical priorities is to be able to act as advocate for vulnerable groups and bring experience from the field to the policy debate and policies into the practices. It would be logical to pursue our ability to function as information generation & knowledge management organization. We are in a possession of huge data that generates both from clinic and community on monthly basis. However, with our current strengths we are not capacitated to use the data for that purpose. This requires institutional strengthening and more collaborative work. Which, we would like to explore with our utmost sincerity.
It
is a great pleasure to acknowledge all the sincere support that we receive from
our development partners; from the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and
from collaborative partners both nationally and internationally, and from the
community we work for. We are heading with a big responsibility that our community
has entrusted on us and we have our full commitment to accomplish it.
November
, 2005
