The Department of Natural Sciences of Daffodil International University organized a seminar on “Poverty and Development: The Struggle to Empower the Poor” today on 26 October 2013 at DIU Virtual Centre. Mr. Motasim Billah, Chevening Fellow, UK & Senior Researcher of the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), University of Dhaka, presented the keynote paper. Dr. Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, Assistant Professor in Natural Sciences Department was the moderator of the seminar.
More than 80 students from the department of English, CSE, ETE, EEE and Textiles and Engineering of DIU attended the seminar.
Participants of the seminar on “Poverty and Development: The Struggle to Empower the Poor” along with Mr. Motasim Billah, Chevening Fellow, UK & Senior Researcher of the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), University of Dhaka and moderator of the seminar Dr. Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, Assistant Professor in Natural Sciences Department.
Speaker at the seminar said, poverty and development must always come back to the fundamentals of ‘what is means to be poor’, not in theory but in reality. He emphasized on the broad macro and global context of poverty and development, before concluding with a household-level view of poverty reduction planning and micro-level poverty policy analysis. He further adopted the idea of ‘Development as Freedom’ (Amartay Sen) and ‘Participatory Development’ (Robert Chambers) and explained that improvements in individual welfare and capacity for self-reliant escape from poverty is as much about ensuring that the poor have a voice that is heard in the corridors of power. The speaker also urged the students to consider the development and poverty in the context of social, political and economic dimensions.
