This Is Lota 

Lota leads a busy life with her mother in Bangladesh. She’s hardworking and entrepreneurial, managing several small businesses including tailoring, vegetable farming, breeding goats, dairy farming and veterinary vaccinating.  

Lota now owns multiple businesses, including raising livestock.

It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago Lota was at her life’s lowest point. As an obedient daughter, she had married the man her family chose, but to her family’s horror, her new husband was an abusive drug addict.  

With almost nothing to her name, she returned to her family. 

My main struggle in life at that time was my economic condition. I was in a very weak and hopeless situation. 

Changing The Course 

Lota’s life could have stalled there, but it didn’t.  

With determination, she threw herself into our Partner’s local program, delivered in partnership with the Australian Government through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP). She joined a Self-Help Group where she and others in her community learned the skills needed to grow and sell vegetables and raise goats.  

This changed the course of Lota’s life as she discovered, with the right training, she was a capable farmer who could use her gifts to improve her life, and the lives of others too.  

The LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor . . . to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair’. (Isaiah 61:1-3)

Lota then used her family’s land to grow crops. Soon, she was able to start breeding animals with a small loan from our Partner to buy her first nanny goat. ‘Within two years I had 12 goats,’ she said. ‘After this, I thought to expand my farming and bought a pregnant jersey cow.’ With crops and dairy farming well underway, Lota wisely committed herself to more training and has become a skilled tailor and cattle vaccinator. In this way, she has insured her income with diverse income streams.

An Advocate For Justice 

Along with her many commercial skills, Lota has developed a passion for challenging the injustice of poverty that too many people—especially women—experience. She now volunteers with our Partner to train other women so they too can discover and apply their gifts and find the independence, security and dignity she now knows. 

Lota now volunteers with our Partner to train other women.

If the women start small scale like me then they will be able to financially contribute to their family, then conflict will be reduced, and they will get respect from their family.

Baptist World Aid’s local Partners run 15 projects in five countries that are supported by the Australian Government through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP).