The British Council provides enormous opportunities for young Bangladeshis to gain the skills they need for employment. Through our projects related to democracy and transparency, we are creating Active Citizens who are actively working in different social awareness project throughout the year to implement the SDGs within their communities and to also participate in global dialogues.
To take this forward, recently our Active Citizens Youth Leadership project of the Society programme partnered with the Department of Youth Development (DYD), Ministry of Youth and Sports, Government of Bangladesh to build social leadership skills in young people and to promote youth volunteerism in Bangladesh through community engagement.
Through this collaboration, a new window has been opened for working with around 2000 young people of Bangladesh across 64 districts. A pool of facilitators will be developed with Active Citizens methodology and training toolkits, supporting young people across Bangladesh in building their social leadership skills. These facilitators will then cascade the learnings to the young people, who will carry out social action projects within their communities on various social themes. After successful completion of the training and social action projects, each participant will be awarded a certificate jointly signed by the DYD and the British Council. These trained young people will act as change agents in their local communities and deliver social action projects to solve local issues. Furthermore, through this programme, the young people of Bangladesh will be actively engaged in community-related development activities and will bring together people with different beliefs and perspectives to learn from and share with each other. They will aslo be able to connect with millions of like-minded people around the world who collectively want to make fairer and more inclusive societies in 68 countries.
The MoU signing ceremony took place in the presence of Mr. A. N. Ahammad Ali, Director General (Additional Charge), Department of Youth Development; and senior officials from Ministry of Youth and Sports, Barbara Wickham, Director Bangladesh, British Council, Dr Shahnaz Karim, Director Society, British Council. Sharing her gratitude Barbara Wickham stated “The British Council is delighted to be partnering with Department of Youth Development to build the leadership skills of young people across the country. The next generation of young people in Bangladesh have a key role to play in improving the overall socio-economic status of the country and our flagship youth social leadership programme Active Citizens has already supported nearly 40,000 young people to develop the skills they and the country need. Through this collaboration we look forward to working with even more future leaders.”
