Written by: Asiful Haidar Chowdhury (Senior Research Fellow) Late afternoon in Mirpur, the pharmacy counter is busy. Someone wants “something strong” for a cough that has not gone away. Another person asks for an antibiotic by name, confidently, like it’s a household staple. The drug seller has seconds to respond. Refuse, and risk losing the customer

Written by: Marhouba Khan Asfi (Research Assistant) Bangladesh is urbanizing rapidly. More people are living in cities every year, and that growth increases demand for services of every kind, including health care. City corporations and municipalities are expected to deliver public services in urban areas, but they face real limits in staffing, funding, space, coordination, and

Written by: Nabila Binth Jahan (Junior Research Associate) Fieldwork rarely begins with a recorder switched on. More often, it begins with waiting, outside clinics, in narrow lanes, beside busy roads, or under the sun, hoping someone will spare a few minutes to talk. In the urban slum areas of Dhaka where CHORUS Projects 1 and 2

Written by: Umme Salma Anee (Senior Research Assistant) A park can be five minutes away and still feel unreachable. For many women and adolescent girls in urban Bangladesh, the barrier is not a lack of interest in being active. It is what surrounds the activity itself: the walk to the space, the fear of harassment, the

Written by: Kazi Fatin Sami (Research Assistant) Whenever someone goes through a difficult moment in life, a familiar regret tends to appear: “I wish someone had warned me earlier,” or “If only I had known about this risk in advance.” The same pattern holds true for health. For many diseases and health-related conditions, warning signs are

Written by: Ibrahim Hasan (Research Assistant) Some vaccination cards were crisp and complete, the kind you can read in seconds. Others arrived as blurred photos taken in low light, with smudged ink and handwritten dates that could be read two different ways. I spent a lot of time zooming in until the text almost broke apart,

Written by: Lenik Chakma (Research Assistant) In some restaurants, the “No Smoking” sign was there, neatly placed on a wall. The smell told a different story. In transport hubs, the rules were visible on paper, but the pace and crowd made enforcement feel like an afterthought. That gap, between what the law says and what people

Written by: Sirat-E-Rowshan Islam (Research Uptake and Communication Officer) Mira Bala (pseudonym), a 45-year-old mother of three, living in a small village in a district town with limited healthcare facilities, makes a calculation every morning how many blood sugar test strips she can afford this week. If she buys the full insulin prescription, her eldest daughter’s