Blind Education and Rehabilitation Development Organisation

BERDO was founded on July 17, 1991, in order to help people with disabilities in Bangladesh.[1] The executive director of BERDO, MD.Saidul Huq, called for "creating an environment where the people with disability can enjoy life with dignity" in 2005.[2] Its microcredit program is aimed at supporting people with physical disabilities and is one of its main support programs.[3][4] It also tries to support education initiatives for people with disabilities; the organization recently partnered with the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation to give scholarships to people with blindness.[5] BERDO also created a "talking library" to support education initiatives for blind people so they can continue on with school despite a lack of braille textbooks; the library holds hundreds of book on cassette tape so people who are blind can listen to them.[6] To help create more access to braille texts, BERDO helped to create and test a Bengali-to-braille software translator that will help to create braille books at 20% of the cost.[7] According to BERDO, there are 2,000,000 people in Bangladesh suffering from some sort of eye disability.[3]

BERDO often attracts government ministers to its events celebrating the rights of people with disabilities in Bangladesh.[8][9] Its 20th anniversary celebration brought a number of ministry leaders of Bangladesh to speak as guests.[8]