Can traveling empower women? The answer is a big YES if you ask Dr Sakina Haque.
Dr Haque traveled through Bangladesh a few years ago along with her two friends. They went through smalls towns and highways and muddy tracks and met hundreds of girls and women on their way.
Then came a realization.
Dr Haque was convinced that many Bangladeshi women wanted to travel but they couldn’t because of society. She decided to do something about it.
In November 2016, Dr Haque co-founded Travelettes of Bangladesh group on Facebook along with Dr Manoshi Saha to “empower women through travelling.”
And the Facebook group lives up to its motto. It has grown to a strong network of some 60,000 girls and women in Bangladesh and works as a platform of sisterhood and connection.
The all-female group urges young girls and women to step outside their comfort zone and provides them with opportunities for safe traveling. “I believe motorcycles give us freedom,” Dr Haque says in an interview published by the IPS news agency. “You have amazing views. You can stop whenever you want to, and you get to see so much beauty around you.”
“We wanted to prove that women can do it, they can step out of their comfort zones and travel, also because everyone was against it, our families and our society. Have you ever seen a girl ride a bike? They would say this to keep us dependent. It was a rare site, no doubt about that, but now, a lot of women ride scooters and motorcycles,” she adds.
Dr Haque is not just a travel enthusiast. She is a medical officer at the Disease Control unit of the Bangladesh government.
Apart from great academic achievements, Dr Haque has a long list of accolades. She is the first woman to travel all the 64 districts of Bangladesh by motorcycle and has been chosen as a country’s representative when it comes to women’s empowerment.
Engaging young girls
Dr Haque has also interacted with 23,000 young girls and talked about menstrual health, which is often considered a taboo in a conservative Bangladeshi society.
Thanks to her medical profession, Dr Haque capitalized on her traveling by reaching out to young girls and engage them in open discussions on their rights and health.
“We wanted to go to the root level, talk to women, understand what they are facing and interact with them,” Dr Haque tells the interviewer. “What we realized is, it is hard to pour water in a cup which is already full, and that was the reason behind choosing school going girls because we felt we could motivate them more.”
Dr Haque has been traveling for around three years now and has explored every nook and cranny of Bangladesh.
However, traveling hasn’t been a walk in the park for Dr Haque and fellow travelers.
They have not only faced a barrage of criticism, but they were also subject to harassment. They were asked the same question every empowered woman faces: “Why you are doing what you are doing?”
“Women on bikes and traveling alone is not something people were used to seeing, at least not five or six years ago,” says Dr Haque.
But the situation is completely different now. She is happy that now women even don’t rely on groups like Travelettes of Bangladesh to travel. And it’s a good thing because Dr Haque says she doesn’t want women to depend or rely on any organizations.
“We wanted them to go on their own, travel on their own, so this has been a major change in the country,” says Dr Haque.
However, while Dr Haque and other brave women have made some amazing achievements in the past few years, a lot still needs to be done as girls and women in Bangladesh continue to face violence.
In a 65-page report published last year, the Human Rights Watch found that the cases of violence against women seemed to have jumped in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The report, titled “‘I Sleep in My Own Deathbed’: Violence against Women and Girls in Bangladesh,” is based on 50 interviews to identify the challenges faced by Bangladeshi women.
“Despite some important advances, the government response remains deeply inadequate, barriers to reporting assault or seeking legal recourse are frequently insurmountable, and services for survivors are in short supply,” the report notes.
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