Grameenphone CEO visits village in Gazipur

Grameenphone CEO visits village in Gazipur
Grameenphone Ltd. Chief Executive Officer, Anders Jensen, along with three other members of its management team, paid a visit to a village and an adjoining village high school in Gazipur today.

The primary purpose of the visit was to learn first hand about the villagers' communication needs, their experiences with mobile telephones, and how or what Grameenphone could do to better meet their communication needs.
The CEO's team included Rubaba Dowla, Director, Marketing; Md. Shafiqul Islam, Chief Technical Officer; and Syed Yamin Bakht, Director, Public Relations, among other senior members of Grameenphone.
The CEO and his team first visited the Koyer High School, located at Boro Koyer village under Pubail Upazilla of Gazipur district, to spread the message of mobile internet and its benefits to the students. The Grameenphone CEO met with the students of Classes 9 and 10 and spoke to them about the benefits of communication and the internet.
Talking about the easy availability of information over the internet, the Grameenphone CEO added that "the internet has brought all research material at our finger tips, if we only know how to search and where to look."
He later handed over four laptops, with EDGE connectivity, to the students as a valuable addition to the school's library resource. "You may have heard about the Information Superhighway, well all I can say is welcome to the information age," he told the students. The Grameenphone CEO also planted a neem sapling at the school ground to mark his visit.
After the visit to the high school, the Grameenphone team also visited Boro Koyer a nearby village where they met with some village women at an informal Uthan Baithak (open-air meet). The discussion focused on their communications needs and while all of them didn't have a mobile set of their own, they had all used mobiles, often to call family members overseas. Jensen offered his phone to one of the women to call anywhere she desired and she seized the opportunity to call her son who is studying in Singapore. During the call, the mother insisted that her son speak to the Grameenphone CEO and they both exchanged cordial words.
The Grameenphone Healthline project was also discussed at the meet and pamphlets on the service handed over. At one point one of the people among the group used a Grameenphone official's phone to speak to a physician regarding an infliction he was suffering from.
A mobile phone was also handed over to the head Imam of the local mosque. The team also visited some households within the village with the same objective to understand their communication needs. They also met with some local farmers, and demonstrated how they could find out the current price of their produce in the market through the Grameenphone CellBazaar service.

The CEO also handed over a few mobile phone handsets, along with connections, and some other gifts to the women and farmers in the village. The CEO also stopped by at the local retail outlets in the bazaar and met with the local Grameenphone retailer.

The villagers were very excited to see the Grameenphone team and a huge gathering turned out to meet with and talk to the CEO and his team at length about their experiences with the mobile phone.