Last week in L4 Geography, the students were learning about what it is like to live in poverty in a developing country like Bangladesh through playing the ‘Paper Bag Game’, devised by Christian Aid. The activity requires the girls to try and make as many paper bags as they can in a short time-frame and to then calculate from this how many they could make in a day (working for ten hours straight), to then be ‘paid’ this amount in ‘Takas’. This is based on the way some people really earn a living in cities like Dhaka.
To buy the daily essentials (at the time the game was devised) Christian Aid estimated a person would need 26 Takas to be able to buy food, fuel for cooking, pay for shelter and buy enough materials to carry on making paper bags to earn more money the next day. Sadly, many of the L4 did not earn enough money to meet their daily essentials, and even those that did realised they would struggle to afford education or medical bills if they became ill. This opened up an opportunity to discuss the lack of economic resilience to the risks associated with poverty that many people face on a daily basis in the developing world.
To view photos from the ‘Paper Bag Game’ event, please click here
