Supporting the Right to Bangla Literacy through USAID’s Esho Shikhi Activity

• In Event: Collaboration is Key: Using Co-Creation of Early-Grade Interventions to Ensure the Right to Education in Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Lebanon

Proposal

The right to speak, study, and work in the Bangla language galvanized popular support for the Bengali Language Movement in 1947. Driven by a strong linguistic consciousness and desire to promote and protect spoken and written Bangla as a state language of the then Dominion of Pakistan, activists started organizing and protests eventually broke out. On February 21, 1952, students, political activists, and concerned citizens were killed by police during protests near the campus of the University of Dhaka, the first-ever martyrs to die for their right to speak their mother tongue. The language protests catalyzed a larger social uprising that eventually led to Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, forever linking the Bangla language to national identity and pride. This is reflected in Bangladesh’s observance of February 21 as Language Movement Day (designed as International Mother Language Day by UNESCO in 2000) and the fact that Bangla is the language of instruction for government schools, an enduring legacy of the language martyrs.

It is against this backdrop that in 2021 USAID’s Esho Shikhi Activity entered co-creation with the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) for a 5-year primary education intervention. In alignment with the GoB’s Fourth Primary Education Development Program (PEDP4) strategy (DPE, 2018) and the GoB’s priority to provide quality Bangla education, Esho Shiki is focused on improving Bangla literacy. It aims to increase learning opportunities, enhance teaching quality and teaching and learning materials for Bangla literacy instruction, strengthen the capacity of field-level mentors to deliver quality education and improve school communities’ ability to mitigate and manage the effects of shocks and stressors on education access and quality.

Through three cohorts, Esho Shikhi will implement programming in 8 divisions, 15 districts, and 81 upazilas, targeting 10,000 schools and 20,000 teachers from grades one and two. This is accomplished by working side-by-side with GoB’s Ministry of Primary and Mass Education (MoPME) and the Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) as a service unit supporting the implementation of PEDP4. Cohort one started in October 2022 and cohort two will start in October 2023. Through Esho Shikhi, USAID, GoB, and Winrock are gathering important insights on co-creation and effective partnership-building strategies for early-grade education programs in Bangladesh. The project’s learning agenda includes a question on co-creation and the team is undertaking dedicated research to gather evidence and best practices throughout implementation.

Insights and reflections shared by this group will be helpful for other implementing partners, donors, and government officials working to fulfill the dream of Bangla literacy fought for by the original language martyrs.

Authors

• Sudeb Kumar Biswas, USAID

• R. Drake Warrick, Winrock International