On 18 June 2021, Work for a Better Bangladesh (WBB) Trust opened its first farmers’ market in Dhaka as part of a project sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The project sought to increase low-income residents’ access to healthy and nutritious food grown without chemicals and to help farmers market their produce. An additional goal was to improve public space in Dhaka by converting a street used for dumping trash into a lively and attractive public space each Friday morning.

In crowded Asian cities, land is expensive and parks are scarce. Streets and roads are occupied by vehicles, whether moving, parked, or stuck in traffic. As a result, people have few opportunities for outdoor exercise, socializing, and recreation. Small children are particularly affected as parents are afraid to let them play in the streets and are often too busy to take them to the few places where they may be able to play outdoors as those spaces are frequently far from home.

Our partner in India, ESAF, formed a Walking Club at K.T. Nagar Park in Nagpur in 2017. The purpose was to promote physical activity and inform the community about non-communicable diseases.

Evangelical Social Action Forum organizes open street events on Sundays of each month with the support of local partner at different locations in Guwahati, Assam leading to increased walking and cycling.

Students in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka recently drew pictures portraying the difficulties they face on the way to school.

For years, HealthBridge has worked closely with the local government of Hoi An, a small city in central Vietnam, to improve public spaces. More recently, our work has focused on promoting cycling and further reducing the use of motorized vehicles. Cars are already banned in the old quarter and motorbikes limited to certain periods of the day. The work was further enhanced by being awarded a grant from the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) to work on cycling.

WBB, with support from UN-Habitat & Dhaka North City Corporation worked with a low-income community in Dhaka to design six public spaces using the computer game Minecraft.

The project, lead by Cidade Ativa, aimed to transform a well-used public staircase into a safer, more accessible public space.

In 2018, HealthBridge and partners won a challenge to make the city of Da Nang more livable for its most disadvantaged populations. Responding to the Da Nang Social Cohesion Challenge, the consortium of HealthBridge, Think Playground (Vietnam) and Playground Ideas (Australia), proposed to revitalize a public space in Da Nang city by transforming a dumpsite into a neighbourhood park.

A new report from Evangelical Social Action Forum (ESAF) and HealthBridge Foundation of Canada shares the results of a walkability study in Nagpur, India.