Bitter Pills:Medicines & The Third World Poor | Page 128

If people are to be able to get access to water, land and credit to grow enough
food to be healthy, it is vital that they should be in a position to defend their rights
in the face of harrassment from the powerful, usually educated people in the
community. To this end the People's School has been set up at Savar to educate
the children, who in turn help with adult literacy classes for their parents.
A further serious obstacle to better health is the fact that the women are held back
from playing an active role in improving hygiene and nutrition both by their lack
of education and their low status in the community. Their oppression is being
actively challenged at Gonoshasthaya Kendra. Most of the paramedics are women,
who are visibly seen to be challenging convention as they set off for work in the
villages on their bicycles. But village women are also participating in literacy classes,
and acquiring radically new vocational skills to enable them to gain some
independence and more equality. They are learning shoe-making, bakery, sewing,
carpentry, welding and other skilled manual jobs that have been strictly male
preserves.

GONOSHASTHAYA PHARMACEUTICALS LIMITED
One of the tasks recently accomplished by the women in the project workshop
is the construction of all the metal window-frames for the project's brand new
pharmaceutical factory.(51 The factory started production in May 1981 with the
formulation of the first batches of ampicillin and paracetamol.
It is an ambitious step for Gonoshasthaya Kendra, a charitable trust, to have set
up a sizeable commercial operation to manufacture drugs in rural Bangladesh.
But the team at Gonoshasthaya Kendra had strong motivation, having experienced
the difficulties of obtaining inexpensive, good quality generics, with the local
market dominated by the subsidiaries of big research-based manufacturers. As
the team at Gonoshasthaya Kendra explain: "The project experience, and
especially the problem of getting good and cheap medicines to the people ... led
to thinking about a pharmaceutical fact