Sabina Rashid

• BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Understanding of fatherhood amongst men greatly influences men’s roles and practices. There is limited information in the Bangladeshi context on the knowledge, perceptions, and practices regarding fatherhood of young males, which have a significant influence on their sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This study uses data from a nationwide mixed...

Current prevalence of disability in Bangladesh stands at 7.14%. Due to various misconceptions, stigma, and lack of policies, they are more vulnerable to violence and abuse from perpetrators. However, there is a paucity of research on the prevalence of emotional, physical, and sexual violence in the country. To address this knowledge gap, the curren...

Equitable health research requires actively engaging communities in producing new knowledge to advocate for their health needs. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) relies on the coproduction of contextual and grounded knowledge between researchers, programme implementers and community partners with the aim of catalysing action for change....

Infectious disease outbreaks are social events as much as biomedical ones. They arise and evolve in complex, unpredictable ways that are influenced by interactions within and across human, animal, and environmental ecosystems. Data and evidence from the social sciences bring visibility to the ways in which these dynamics shape outbreak trajectories...

Adolescent boys (age 9–19) are impacted differently by humanitarian emergencies. However, academic research on adolescent health and child protection has tended to focus on the direct impacts of an emergency rather than indirect impacts that may arise after a crisis. We sought to identify child protection concerns affecting adolescent boys in emerg...

The rhetoric around child marriage continues to be framed in binary terms, with the difference between ‘arranged’ and ‘love’ marriages hinging on the concept of consent.1 The context in which consent is constructed, however, remains less explored. ‘Lack of consent’ is a very hard concept to define. Most studies tend to focus on the support for, and...

Background Menstrual health is essential for gender equity and the well-being of women and girls. Qualitative research has described the burden of poor menstrual health on health and education; however, these impacts have not been quantified, curtailing investment. The Adolescent Menstrual Experiences and Health Cohort (AMEHC) Study aims to describ...

Background: University students are more at risk of mental illness compared with the general population. Declaration of a global COVID-19 pandemic led the Bangladesh government in March 2020 to implement a national lockdown, home quarantining, social distancing measures, and closure of educational institutions. We aimed to explore the impact of loc...

Public university campuses in Bangladesh have been historically significant sites of negotiating with social and political orders. Based on in-depth interviews with male and female students from three public universities in Dhaka, conducted between 2022 and 2023, this article identifies the ways in which formal and informal structures of power on c...

This article critically reviews the literature on urban informality, inequity, health, well-being and accountability to identify key conceptual, methodological and empirical gaps in academic and policy discourses. We argue that critical attention to power dynamics is often a key missing element in these discourses and make the case for explicit att...

This study explores the impact of migration on the access and utilisation of sexual and reproductive health services by women living in an informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A total of 16 in-depth interviews were conducted in March and April of 2019 with women (18-49 years old) who had migrated from rural areas to Dhaka. They reported contin...

Background Following the mass influx of Rohingya refugees into Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh in 2017, makeshift settlement camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf have been overburdened, leading to livelihood challenges for both Rohingya and host communities. The humanitarian crisis has had adverse effects on vulnerable populations, which include older people, perso...

The Rohingya diaspora is a politically sensitive humanitarian crisis for Bangladesh. The current Covid-19 pandemic poses a range of governance, demographic, and environmental policy challenges in an already fragile context. The ongoing situation combined with the pandemic requires a rethinking of humanitarian strategies to tackle the double burden...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in Dhaka City’s infrastructure, leading to higher case and death counts when compared to other districts in Bangladesh. To blunt the impacts of the pandemic on the urban poor, BRAC, one of the largest nongovernmental organizations in the world, used a previously established cadre of community health workers...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an adverse impact on the Rohingya and the Bangladeshi host communities, which have been well documented in the literature. However, the specific groups of people rendered most vulnerable and marginalized during the pandemic have not been studied comprehensively. This paper draws on data to identify the most vulnerable...

Vaccine hesitancy or low uptake was identified as a major threat to global health by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019. Vaccine hesitancy is context-specific and varies across time, place, and socioeconomic groups. In this study, we aimed to understand the perceptions of and attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination through time among urban s...

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised new concerns about healthcare service availability, accessibility, and affordability in complex humanitarian settings where heterogeneous populations reside, such as Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. This study was conducted in ten Rohingya camps and four wards of the adjacent host communities in Cox’s Bazar to under...

Empirical evidence suggests that the health outcomes of children living in slums are poorer than those living in non-slums and other urban areas. Improving health especially among children under five years old (U5y) living in slums, requires a better understanding of the social determinants of health (SDoH) that drive their health outcomes. Therefo...

The Bangladesh government issued a lockdown throughout the country from March–May 2020 in response to the COVID-19. The sudden lockdown caused economic ruptures across the country due to job loss. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of the outbreak through 40 in-depth interviews with men and women living in three Dhaka informal settlements from J...

Close-to-community (CTC) health workers play a vital role in providing sexual and reproductive health services in low-income urban settlements in Bangladesh. Retention of CTC health workers is a challenge, and work motivation plays a vital role in this regard. Here, we explored the factors which affect their work motivation. We conducted 22 in-dept...

The Rohingya and Bangladeshi host communities live at a heightened risk of COVID-19 impact due to their pre-existing vulnerabilities, religious beliefs, and strict socio-cultural and gender norms that render primarily women and girls vulnerable. However, the extent of this vulnerability varies within and across population groups in the host and Roh...

Background Following the mass influx of Rohingya refugees into Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh in 2017, makeshift settlement camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf have been overburdened, leading to livelihood challenges for both Rohingya and host communities. The humanitarian crisis has had adverse effects on vulnerable populations, which include the elderly, person...

Background In Bangladesh, men’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs and related services are often neglected. Little is known of men’s SRH concerns, and of the phenomenal growth of the informal and private health actors in the provision of sexual health services to men in rural and urban areas of Bangladesh. Methods Using a mixed methods ap...

Applied mixed methods research for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues involves multiple researchers and presents numerous responsibilities as well as unforeseen challenges. These challenges together with the often ignored and under-researched area of male sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in Bangladesh require researchers to...

The massive influx of Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh has created a severe humanitarian crisis, which has been exacerbated by the COVID–19 pandemic. The research focused on the most vulnerable groups (MVGs) of Rohingya and adjacent host communities, such as pregnant and/or lactating women, elderly people (64+ years), persons...

The paper considers first Bangladesh and then Colombia, providing an overview of (i) Background information on governance and populations, health systems, and the digital context; (ii) The legal framework and policies on health, including digital health; (iii) National laws and policies regulating Information and Communication Technologies and conc...

Contact tracing can play an important role in controlling infectious disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Containing the spread of COVID-19 is crucial in humanitarian settings such as in the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This manuscript describes the COVID-19 contact tracing activities undertaken by a group of researchers a...

Introduction The Rohingya and Bangladeshi host communities live at a heightened risk of COVID-19 impact due to their pre-existing vulnerabilities, religious beliefs, and strict socio-cultural and gender norms that render primarily women and girls vulnerable. However, the extent of this vulnerability varies within and across population groups in th...

Background Social capital, which describes the social ties enjoyed by groups and networks with common interests, is one of the most useful resources in society. These networks could be both formal and informal, with positive effects seen at both individual and community levels—especially during crisis management. In building urban resilience and to...

Background Vaccine hesitancy was identified as a major threat to global health by WHO in 2019. This hesitancy was also observed with COVID-19 vaccination rollout in many countries including Bangladesh, where it began on Feb 7, 2021. Reasons for this include lack of knowledge, misinformation, low trust in health systems, and so on. Vaccine hesitancy...

Background: University students are more at risk of mental illness compared with the general population. Declaration of a global COVID-19 pandemic led the Bangladesh government in March 2020 to implement a national lockdown, home quarantining, social distancing measures, and closure of educational institutions. We aimed to explore the impact of loc...

Background: According to World Health Organization (WHO), vulnerable groups such as persons with disabilities are facing severe impacts of the pandemic. There has always been significant challenges and hurdles in terms of achieving adequate and equitable inclusivity of persons with disabilities in all sections of social life. Education and employme...

Objectives: This study aimed at examining health sufferings of readymade garments (RMG) workers, the factors that affect their health sufferings, their healthcare seeking pattern, knowledge about health insurance and health related rights in Bangladesh. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 486 RMG workers recruited randomly from...

COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge impact on public health and economy of Bangladesh. Population groups such as persons with disabilities are experiencing the worse outcomes in terms of managing their livelihoods, health and well-being. In this paper, we utilized publicly available information and data obtained from an ongoing research study conduct...

Adolescent birth is a major global concern owing to its adverse effects on maternal and child health. We assessed trends in adolescent birth and examined its associations with child undernutrition in Bangladesh using data from seven rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys (1996–2017, n = 12,006 primiparous women with living children <5 years old)....

This study explores factors that shape parents' decisions as to whether or not to arrange an early marriage of a girl child in the context of urban informal settlements in Bangladesh. The article draws on data from a larger mixed methods study conducted in two informal urban settlements of Bangladesh, and the analysis was guided by the theory of so...

In the publication of the original article [1] an error was introduced during the typesetting process. Due to this: the original publication did not show the correct equal contribution of the author groups. In this correction article the correct and incorrect information is shown. The original article has been updated. Incorrect: † Rushdia Ahmed, B...

Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) is an important issue for everyone. However, it is being neglected for young males (15-24 years) in Bangladesh. A majority of SRHR research and interventions are female-centric. Although the government of Bangladesh has taken many initiatives to improve the sexual and reproductive health and rights o...

Background Rohingya diaspora or Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMNs), took shelter in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh due to armed conflict in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. In such humanitarian crises, delivering sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services is critical for better health outcomes of this most-at-risk population...

Research has shown that persons with disabilities require greater sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care and services than persons without disabilities. However, this need is often neglected in most of the low-and-middle-income countries including Bangladesh. There is also a dearth of research and data relevant to this issue. A nationwide mixed-...

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY HAZARDS: AN EXPLORATIVE STUDY OF DHAKA CITY WASTE HANDLERS S.A. Urme, M.A. Radia, M.C. Uzzal, S. Ahmed, H.H. Sara, M.S. Islam, D.T. Jerin, S. Hasan, P.S. Hema, R. Alam, M. Rahman, A.K.M.M. Islam, Z. Quayyum, M.T. Hasan & S.F. Rashid BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Bangladesh ABSTRACT Wast...

During humanitarian emergencies, such as the forced displacement of the Rohingya diaspora, women and adolescent girls become highly vulnerable to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) issues and abuse. Although sensitive in nature, community-driven information is essential for designing and delivering effective community-centric SRH services. This a...

Safeguarding is rapidly rising up the international development agenda, yet literature on safeguarding in related research is limited. This paper shares processes and practice relating to safeguarding within an international research consortium (the ARISE hub, known as ARISE). ARISE aims to enhance accountability and improve the health and well-bei...

This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and s...

Background: The recent publication of the WHO guideline on support to optimise community health worker (CHW) programmes illustrates the renewed attention for the need to strengthen the performance of CHWs. Performance partly depends on motivation, which in turn is influenced by incentives. This paper aims to critically analyse the use of incentive...

Background People with disabilities constitute about 10% of the total population of Bangladesh. They are more likely to experience poor health than those without disabilities. However, there is a lack of evidence on their primary health care (PHC) seeking behaviour for their general illness. The aim of this study was to understand the PHC seeking b...

Close-to-community (CTC) providers have been identified as a key cadre to progress universal health coverage and address inequities in health service provision due to their embedded position within communities. CTC providers both work within, and are subject to, the gender norms at community level but may also have the potential to alter them. This...

Responsiveness entails the social actions by health providers to meet the legitimate expectations of patients. It plays a critical role in ensuring continuity and effectiveness of care within people centered health systems. Given the lack of contextualized research on responsiveness, we qualitatively explored the perceptions of outpatient users and...

Understanding the actual SRHR needs of Bangladeshi adolescents and youths and develop evidence-based digital communication tools easily accessible to them.

Background: As many as one-third of all pregnancies in Bangladesh are unplanned, with nearly one-half of these pregnancies ending in either menstrual regulation (MR) or illegal clandestine abortion. Although MR is provided free of charge, or at a nominal cost, through the public sector and various non-profits organizations, many women face barriers...

Topic: Equity, rights, gender and ethics: maintaining responsiveness through values-based health systems. http://epo.epostersonline.net/gshr2016/node/4124

Background: REACHOUT is an international five year project on implementation research and delivery science (IRDS), which aims to understand and strengthen the role of close‐to‐community (CTC) health workers. This is critical in the context of a multitude of private, public and informal actors providing services in Bangladesh. The team led by James....

Background: In LMICs, Community Health Workers (CHW) increasingly play health promotion related roles involving 'Empowerment of communities'. To be able to empower the communities they serve, we argue, it is essential that CHWs themselves be, and feel, empowered. We present here a critique of how diverse national CHW programs affect CHW's empowerm...

Health Systems Global Blog. Available at http://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/blog/99/Supporting-the-health-system-to-respond-to-the-needs-of-women-in-Bangladesh-Close-to-community-health-service-providers-and-Menstrual-Regulation.html

A range of formal and informal close-to-community (CTC) health service providers operate in an increasingly urbanized Bangladesh. Informal CTC health service providers play a key role in Bangladesh's pluralistic health system, yet the reasons for their popularity and their interactions with formal providers and the community are poorly understood....

Background: The pharmaceutical market in Bangladesh is highly concentrated (top ten control around 70 % of the market). Due to high competition aggressive marketing strategies are adopted for greater market share, which sometimes cross limit. There is lack of data on this aspect in Bangladesh. This exploratory study aimed to fill this gap by inves...

Introduction Indigenous peoples are among the most marginalized peoples in the world due to issues relating to well-being, political representation, and economic production. The research consortium Goals and Governance for Global Health (Go4Health) conducted a community consultation process among marginalized groups across the global South aimed at...

Rationale: Research capacity strengthening is necessary in low and middle income countries (LMICs) to ensure that health policy and programming is well informed. Within a consortium focused on supporting and strengthening the work of close-to-community (CTC) health service providers in sub-Saharan Africa and south-Asia; a platform is provided that...

Background: Different types of formal and informal close-to-community (CTC) health service providers operate in Bangladesh. However, gaps remain in the evidence-base on the roles, responsibilities and performance of CTC providers. For ensuring quality of care understanding the inter-relationships between formal and informal CTC providers and their...

Background: Different types of formal and informal close-to-community (CTC) health service providers operate in Bangladesh. However, gaps remain in the evidence-base on the roles, responsibilities and performance of CTC providers. For ensuring quality of care understanding the inter-relationships between formal and informal CTC providers and their...

There is increasing interest in the role of close-to-community (CTC) programmes in supporting people centred health systems. We need to better understand which approaches work best at-scale in different country contexts and are potentially transferable. The REACHOUT consortium (working in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia, and Mozambiq...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Introduction Close-to-community (CTC) health service providers are playing an important role in delivering health services in both urban and rural areas of Bangladesh. CTC health service providers are the most easily accessible and widely accessed providers. There is a gap in the evidence base on the roles, responsibilities and in...

Infant and child mortality in Bangladesh has declined in recent years but early death rates remain high among Bangladesh’s urban poor, even in comparison to rates in rural Bangladesh. Although they live close to the country’s leading public hospitals and private health clinics, the urban poor continue to rely heavily on services and advice provided...

https://www.kit.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/reachout-inter-country-analysis-and-framework-report.pdf

This study was aimed to estimate the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in a sample of 226 women with disabilities living in four different districts of Bangladesh. It also explored the physical and psychological suffering of women experiencing violence and their various coping strategies. A cross-sectional survey was carried out with 22...

By disaggregating gains in child health in Bangladesh over the past several decades, significant improvements in gender and socioeconomic inequities have been revealed. With the use of a social determinants of health approach, key features of the country's development experience can be identified that help explain its unexpected health trajectory....

Maternal malnutrition in Bangladesh is a persistent health issue and is the product of a number of complex factors, including adherence to food 'taboos' and a patriarchal gender order that limits women's mobility and decision-making. The recent global food price crisis is also negatively impacting poor pregnant women's access to food. It is believe...

The health and rights of populations living in urban slum settlements against the backdrop of increasing risks and disasters brought on by climate change is a key development issue of the twenty-first century. The impacts of natural hazards as a result of climate change are unevenly distributed globally and nationally, with populations in mega citi...

Introduction Little attention has been paid to informal medical markets for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in developing countries, yet recent empirical research in both rural and urban Bangladesh shows that they are substantial and has revealed significant resort by poor men and women to informal providers of SRH services. This chap...

Background Worldwide urbanization has become a crucial issue in recent years. Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely-populated countries in the world, has been facing rapid urbanization. In urban areas, maternal indicators are generally worse in the slums than in the urban non-slum areas. The Manoshi program at BRAC, a non governmental org...

Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health highlights the complex ways in which sexuality is expressed and enacted through local ideologies, global identities and material cultures, and their influence on people’s sexual health and well-being. Its impetus is the renewed interest in technology and the ‘social life of things,’ including ph...

Internalized stigma among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) is prevalent in Bangladesh. A better understanding of the effects of stigma on PLHA is required to reduce this and to minimize its harmful effects. This study employed a quantitative approach by conducting a survey with an aim to know the prevalence of internalized stigma and to identify...

In Bangladesh, particularly in urban slums, married adolescent women's human rights to life, health, and reproductive and sexual health remain adversely affected because of the structural inequalities and political economic, social and cultural conditions which shape how rights are understood, negotiated and lived. The focus of the research and met...

This article describes and analyses a research based engagement by a university school of public health in Bangladesh aimed at raising public debate on sexuality and rights and making issues such as discrimination more visible to policy makers and other key stakeholders in a challenging context. The impetus for this work came from participation in...

In Bangladesh, the formal public health system provides few services for common sexual and reproductive health problems such as white discharge, fistula, prolapse, menstrual problems, reproductive and urinary tract infections, and sexual problems. Recent research has found that poor women and men resort to informal providers for these problems inst...

In Bangladesh, the formal public health system provides few services for common sexual and reproductive health problems such as white discharge, fistula, prolapse, menstrual problems, reproductive and urinary tract infections, and sexual problems. Recent research has found that poor women and men resort to informal providers for these problems inst...

A study was undertaken in Madaripur brothel to understand condom use reality within the social context of the commercial sex workers' (CSW) lives in brothel and to critically analyze BRAC's HIV/AIDS programme's effectiveness in condom promotion. It was found that the chukris (bonded sex workers) were controlled by the sardarnis (madam) and the sard...

Urbanization is occurring at a rapid pace, especially in low-income countries. Dhaka, Bangladesh, is estimated to grow to 50 million by 2015, with 21 million living in urban slums. Although health services are available, neonatal mortality is higher in slum areas than in urban non-slum areas. The Manoshi program works to improve maternal, newborn,...

The health and rights of populations living in informal or slum settlements are key development issues of the twenty-first century. As of 2007, the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. More than one billion of these people, or one in three city-dwellers, live in inadequate housing with no or a few basic resources. In Bangladesh,...

Background and Objectives: Poor Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in developing countries indicates an unacceptably high prevalence of preventable conditions, unnecessary suffering and often devastating consequences for individuals and families. Reproductive health was first acknowledged at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Dev...