Networking skill
While I worked as Assistant Commissioner (Land) in Singra upazila in Natore district I had the great opportunity to work with the mass people. As an administrator,I had to deal with many social issues. One of them was child marriage. Most of the guardians of teenager girl had a tendency to give their daughter marriage under 18 years of age. According to the existing Child Marriage Restrain Act,2017; it was a serious breach of that act. Many attempts earlier had been taken by my predecessors like conducting Mobile Court but it didn't work actually. In most of the cases parents of the daughters arranged marriage in some other places outside that upazila very secretly. I realized that to control this issue, innovative measure might be introduced instead of traditional actions. First I talked with the stakeholders like Kazis(who register the marriage), principles of all primary and secondary schools, Upazila women affairs officer separately. Also I had sitted with local representatives (i.e.Upazila Chairman, all Union Council Chairmen, all union council members etc.).I had a collaboration with the officials of a UNDP funded project named Access to Information(a2i project) as I worked with them in 2014. I also previously had a network with Governance Innovation Unit (GIU) which is a unit of Prime Minister's Office working on innovation in public service delivery and social related issues. I used my network and arranged a number of fruitful sitting with the stakeholders with the assistance of these two entities to make a social awareness among people about the adverse effect of child marriage. Arranging workshop , seminar and symposium on restraining child marriage and involving the stakeholders with these had a great impact. Later on, if any parent tried to conduct a child marriage the concerned kazi didn't register and gave that information to me . I then found the parents and convinced them not to give their child to marry rather continue her study instead. Besides, if any school girl was being tried to be married concerned principal of that school gave that information to me. I would take then proper steps to stop that. Even a hotline number was being introduced to give message or information regarding child marriage by any person of that upazila. Arranging seminar and workshop regularly needed a huge fund that was not possible for me to bear. But a2i and GIU assisted me financially and thus my networking capacity helped to reduce child marriage gradually.