By Kathryn Bodle and Matthew Pendergast

Kathryn Bodle and Matthew Pendergast are Producers in The Asia Foundation’s Digital Media Department. You can reach them at kbodle@asiafound.org and mpendergast@asiafound.org.

As Americans catch their breath from a marathon-long election season, the people of Bangladesh are just weeks from casting their ballots in their own historic, long-awaited election.  And just as Americans were glued to newspapers, computers, and televisions in the days preceding our polling day, Bangladeshis are similarly engrossed in local media coverage of national politics, poring over every breaking report on their candidates, issues, and events in anticipation of the December 29th election. 
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By Kim McQuay

Kim McQuay, a long-time resident of Dhaka, is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Bangladesh. He can be reached at kmcquay@asiafound.org.

Last Wednesday morning, November 5th, I was leaving a gathering in Dhaka that featured big-screen television coverage of the U.S. election, when a cycle rickshaw driver drew up alongside me. I assumed that he had slowed to offer me a ride, but in turning toward him, I found his face lit with excitement. With a wide grin he declared, “Brother, your American election is very good.  Barack Obama President.  I am too much happy.”

This captured the near-universal reaction of the people of Bangladesh, who observed the U.S. electoral process and outcome with keen interest. Local Bangladeshi media coverage of the U.S. elections began in 1992, when Bangladeshi television broadcast evening excerpts of CNN reporting. At the time, Bangladeshis were especially struck by the presidential candidate debates between President George H.W. Bush and Governor Bill Clinton. The concept and images of rival American candidates thoughtfully debating issues of substance and then shaking hands at the close of the debate offered an enticing glimpse of a kind of political culture unknown to Bangladesh—at a time when partisan tensions were starting the bitter course that would ultimately extend to every corner of society, dividing the nation along sharp political lines.
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By Gordon Hein

Gordon Hein is The Asia Foundation’s Vice President for Programs. Below are his welcoming remarks at the 2008 U.S.-Islamic World Regional Forum on Monday in Kuala Lumpur, co-sponsored by The Asia Foundation, the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, and ISIS. He can be reached at ghein@asiafound.org.

Since the U.S.-Islamic World Forum’s launch by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution in 2004, it has made important contributions to dialogue and understanding, and has served as a catalyst for action among organizations from many countries. It is our belief – and our hope – that by holding this conference in Southeast Asia, we can add an additional, vital element to the dialogue that can make it even richer, deeper, and more successful that it has been to date. For this opportunity, I would like to express our gratitude to Ambassador Martin Indyk and his staff at the Saban Center. We are also pleased to be co-sponsoring this event with ISIS, the Institute of Strategic and International Studies here in Kuala Lumpur – led by Tan Sri Mohamed Jawhar Hassan. ISIS is an organization that has contributed so much over the years not only to Malaysia, but to the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, and it’s an organization with which The Asia Foundation has had a long and fruitful history of cooperation.
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By Kim McQuay

Kim McQuay is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Bangladesh. To watch a video featuring the Bangladesh Community-Oriented Policing program, click here.

It was a remarkable scene: a mix of faces from across Asia crowding a small conference room whose walls reverberated with the ring of different languages. In each of the four corners of the room, teams of visitors from Cambodia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste stood huddled in half-circles around flip charts, recording bullet points and sketching diagrams, conferring among themselves, and inviting program planning inputs from teams of resource persons from Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines. On the projection screen at the front of the room, an electronic slide show flashed dozens of colorful images of team members in rural Bangladesh, interacting with police officers, local leaders, representatives of civil society organizations, and ordinary citizens.
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By Sanchita Saxena and Veronique Salze-Lozac’h

Sanchita Saxena is the Vice Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley and Veronique Salze-Lozac’h is The Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Economic Programs.

The last several decades have seen Bangladesh’s dependence on the garment sector grow significantly. In 1983, there were about 50 garment factories in the country. By 2004, this number had jumped to 4,000. Exports have increased from a meager $68 thousand in 1968 to $5.7 billion in 2004. It was around the early 1990’s when consumers in the U.S. and the E.U. began noticing that almost any T-shirt they picked up at their local Walmart, Target or JC Penney was made in Bangladesh. Currently, this sector employs approximately 2.2 million workers, of whom almost 80% are women. It is not an understatement to say that this sector has created enormous economic opportunities for the country’s women, who until the late 1970’s were almost non-existent in the labor force.
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By Barnett Baron

Barnett Baron is the Executive Vice President of The Asia Foundation. The below is from a presentation originally delivered to a luncheon of Korean corporate executives on February 14th in Seoul, Korea.

Corporate social responsibility, corporate philanthropy, and corporate community engagement are terms that have been used more or less interchangeably to describe the relationships between the modern corporation and its shareholders, its employees, the communities in which it operates, and others, including government and civil society.

These concepts have been discussed within the corporate community for many years, but the discussion has now made prime time. The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article on corporate citizenship by Klaus Schwab, CEO of the World Economic Forum. In that article, Schwab disaggregates corporate engagement with “the community beyond its shareholders” into five core components
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By Kim McQuay

Kim McQuay is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Bangladesh.

On January 11, 2008, Bangladesh quietly marked the first anniversary of the state of emergency and appointment of a military-backed Caretaker Government. A year earlier, Bangladeshis had accepted these interventions—and the cancellation of a national parliamentary election that was almost certain to have been rigged by the ruling party and boycotted by the opposition Grand Alliance—as the only viable option in averting a catastrophic course of political confrontation, violence, and bloodshed.
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By Kim McQuay

Kim McQuay is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Bangladesh.

On the evening of Thursday, November 15, the cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that weather monitors had been tracking nervously for two days as it increased in intensity reached the coast of Bangladesh with a fury. Cyclone Sidr battered the coast with 150-mile per hour winds and a tidal surge that lifted waters ten feet or more higher than normal, submerging lands that lie inches above sea level, uprooting mangrove forests, and sweeping away fragile homes, crops, and the lives of human and animal victims who failed to reach shelter as the storm arrived in the cloak of darkness.

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By Syed Al-Muti

Syed Al-Muti is The Asia Foundation’s Director of Local Economic Governance Programs in Bangladesh.

Every year, a substantial portion of Bangladesh is submerged by monsoon floodwaters. Bangladeshis have adapted to this recurrent cycle of seasonal flooding with extraordinary resilience. But then there is extreme, severe flooding. This occurs every few years here, posing a great threat to public health and placing a tremendous strain on social service delivery.

This past July, 2007, severe flooding affected thousands of square kilometers of land in several parts of the country, damaging crops, homes, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities. The flooding devastated rural areas and forced tens of thousands of people from their homes, threatening the lives and livelihoods of farmers, laborers, cycle rickshaw drivers, small traders, and fishermen. In response to this emergency, The Asia Foundation partnered with small business associations in Rangpur and Jessore Districts to address one of the major long-term consequences of flooding—the supply of safe drinking water.
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By Jerome Sayre

Jerome Sayre is the Deputy Country Representative for The Asia Foundation in Bangladesh.

Nine months after a military-backed Caretaker Government assumed power in Bangladesh after the cancellation of parliamentary elections, the tireless cycle rickshaw drivers that navigate the traffic-snarled streets of Dhaka are adjusting to the “new” rules of the road. These new rules are, in fact, the old rules that are now being enforced more strictly and consistently by the Bangladesh Police.

Improved traffic management is part of a larger effort to reform the Bangladesh police, until recently rated by citizens as among the most corrupt public agencies. Bangladesh’s centralized national police force was used by successive elected governments to advance grand corruption, cover up violent crimes and allow political intimidation.
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