Women’s Literacy and Healthcare Centre in Bangladesh

Celebrating a community led project in a remote village in Bangladesh, the Rajapur Women’s Literacy and Healthcare Centre, this exhibition illustrates the collective effort of the professionals living and working in London, who kindly volunteered for this charity project.

The Rajapur Centre has been delivered by Mannan Foundation Trust, a UK registered charity which helps disadvantaged people living in rural Bangladesh. The aim of the Centre is to address social issues and gender inequality. The Centre empowers disadvantaged women by providing income generating and literacy skills and offers free healthcare for the community. For this building, a team of volunteers in London offered professional services and took part in fundraising events. The local people from the community were employed to construct the building to enable community ownership. The community was involved from the very beginning, through workshops and by the adoption of simple building techniques with the aim of instilling self-sufficiency. Constructed from rammed earth and bamboo, the building sits on stilts over a natural ditch so it benefits from evaporative cooling through its special perforated earth blocks and bamboo walls.

This project is not only set to transform the lives of women in Rajapur, but will be a template that can be used in many rural communities across the Indian sub-continent. This is a transformative project led by a London based, young British architect of Bangladeshi origin, passionate about improving the lives and health of the next generation of women in Bangladesh.