UNESCO Dhaka

UNESCO publications are now available at Ekushey Book Fair. UNESCO National Club Bangladesh, with support from UNESCO Dhaka Office,  is displaying UNESCO publications in the fair. The stall is on the main road outside Bangla Academy premise. The bookstall displays most of the relevant UNESCO publications in Bangla and English. Although the books are for display only, some of the publications can be obtained from the UNESCO Dhaka Office. The visitors to the stalls are requested to kindly enter their name in the register and express their interest on the topics and book titles UNESCO Dhaka Office invites all to visit the book stall at Ekushey Book Fair 2009.

The stall will remain open during the usual time of the fair throughout the month of February 2009.

Another digital publication, Nari or Naksha, is available at D.Net's stall. The literacy primer Nari O Naksha was developed by D.Net with technical and financial support of UNESCO Dhaka Office. The e-primer tells a story of a village woman and thus helps the audience to learn the alphabets and counting. You may colect the e-primer from D.Net's stall at the Ekushey Book Fair 2009.

Dinajpur Museum is one of the few museums which have been developed by community initiatives in Bangladesh. It possesses various categories of objects including some rare and interesting pieces of sculptures which testify to the Eastern Indian School of Art in Post-6th century ACE. The rich collection makes this museum a very important repository of tangible heritage of this region. Like many other museums, it did not have a systematically developed catalogue of the collected and displayed objects. The absence of a catalogue informed by the recent data structures about the objects makes the collection of this museum vulnerable to loss and theft.

Under these circumstances, with the funding of UNESCO, Dhaka Office as a part of their mandate to safeguard Cultural Heritage, a team of researchers with the coordination of Swadhin Sen, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, Jahangirnagar University have developed the  digital catalogue of the museum objects for the first time in Bangladesh in 2007. The software of digital database, which is the first in its kind in Bangladesh, was designed by Ziaul Bashar and the team.

You can browse the objects in Dinajpur Museum at http://museum.unescodhaka.org.

Recognizing the overarching need of reliable data on literacy in Bangladesh, the national statistical organization Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), for the first time, conducted nationwide literacy assessment survey, and found the results very interesting. The literacy assessment survey conducted by BBS, with technical and financial support from UNESCO, found adult literacy rate to be 48.8 percent. Interestingly it also shows that about 50% of the adult literates are female, leading to gender parity.  The test based literacy assessment shows that there is much improvement in the overall literacy situation, compared to the results of similar assessments made by other organizations – namely Education Watch (2002) and UNESCO Dhaka Office (2005). However, a sharp decline of literacy among the urban males is observed. The survey also classified the respondents into four groups, based on their level of literacy skills: Non-Literate, Semi-Literate, Literate at Basic Level, and Literate at advanced level.

  Literacy Assessment Survey 2008 (Full Report) (3.47 MB)