SI was privileged to take part in the Commonwealth’s ‘Women as Agents of Change’ competition, launched to celebrate the theme of Commonwealth Day 2011. Although we were restricted to only 3 nominations we received many fantastic submissions. This week, we will be running a special blog series to celebrate all the nominations – a fitting close to a month where women have been celebrated across the Commonwealth!

Shamim Chowdhury – Bangladesh

Shamim Chowdhury is a Soroptimist belonging to SI Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has a degree in Child Psychiatry. Since graduating, she has been involved in working with young children and adolescents suffering from drug addiction, providing counselling and rehabilitation services.

She has worked with the UNDCP and UNODC to develop materials and deliver courses for ‘train the trainers’ in this important area of drug abuse. She continues with this work today and is developing a training module for use in Bangladesh.

Currently she is working with autistic and mentally challenged children, running a school for the welfare of these children and providing high quality training for teachers who want to work in special educational needs. She is also the chairperson of the Special Olympics in

Bangladesh.

Shamim has this to say about her work:

"After training as a Child Psychiatrist I was seeing a lot of children with autism & mental retardation in my practice. The hardest part at that point was breaking the bad news to the parents about my diagnosis. The next hardest part was when parents were asking for a place where they could get some help. Unfortunately there was no facility in our country where I could refer them at that time. It made me feel extremely helpless, thus I decided to do something where I could use expertise & help these children and their parents. Now I have an institution for autistic children to learn, socialize and become independent, bringing joy to their parents."

Her club have this to say: “by working with autistic and mentally challenged children, Shamim is making a great difference in the lives of these children and their families – mothers in particular. She has shown a way forward for disabled children in

Bangladesh, many of whom were neglected, deprived of opportunities and kept hidden from society”.

All week we have been sharing Soroptimist Commonwealth Agents of Change. We hope you have enjoyed reading their stories as much as we have! Please take some time to read the stories of all of these amazing women. Thank you for following!