Sakia Haque
Co-founder of Travelettes of Bangladesh
On November 27, 2016, Sakia Haque, a young doctor, co-founded “Travelettes of Bangladesh”, an online community of over 50,000 female members, with Dr Manoshi Saha. Sakia initiated the community as a Facebook group to encourage women to travel and raise awareness on issues related to travelling, such as hotel booking. The group has recently become a government-supported organisation.
Travelettes of Bangladesh works towards educating women on safe travelling. Sakia also sees the platform as an opportunity to educate younger women about health issues such as menstruation.
The group, since its inception, has completed many trips for female travellers.
“We started the group with the motto to empower women to travel. At the moment we have 51,000 female members in our group and we have organised 83 trips across Bangladesh for them,” Sakia said.
“You know, somebody has to nominate you for The Diana Award and in the beginning, I didn’t know who nominated me,” she added, laughing.
Continuing, she said, “A friend of a friend informed me that I was one of the recipients of The Diana Award this year from Bangladesh. Later, I emailed the foundation and found out that I actually won the award,” adding, “I was very excited and happy and later got to know that a young member of our organisation nominated me.”
