The Bangladeshi NGO known as Friendship may be best known for its floating hospitals which serve the isolated people who live on the ‘chars’, the remote and moving islands that form and dissolve in the country’s three mighty rivers. It understands that solutions and programs for the char dwellers must be as multi-faceted and interlinked as their problems.

Economic welfare only works for a community that has health care and education. Successful health care needs a sanitation infrastructure. Students can’t be educated if they are hungry. And improvements can’t be sustained if peoples’ work is regularly wiped out by natural disasters. So Friendship’s model interlinks six programs – health, education, sustainable economic development, disaster management and infrastructure development, good governance, and cultural preservation.