Following our pilot blog outpost in Tanzania in 2009, we’re launching our second blog outpost in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh next week.

After conducting a nation-wide competition to find outreach bloggers with the right combination of blogging skills and passion for social justice, we chose Joel Katz and Sharna Bremner.

Joel and Sharna will depart for Bangladesh on the 4th of June and will return to Australia on the 19th of June 2010 – giving them two weeks to train local staff and a citizen journalist group to use Twitter and blogs to tell their stories.

While in Bangladesh, Joel and Sharna will be uploading blog posts each day to the TOTO Blog (http://blogs.actionaid.org.au/toto) keeping followers up to date with the project.

They’ll also be posting updates on their respective Twitter accounts (@JoelKatz1 and @Sharnajb)

We’ll also be linking to all the posts from Joel, Sharna and the Bangladeshi trainee bloggers from our @ActionAid_Aus twitter account.

Interest in TOTO Bangladesh is heating up, with stories in the SMH as well as local press and interviews with our bloggers on a number of national and state radio stations over the past few weeks.

The media interest has been great, but we also need bloggers to help spread the word and encourage like-minded people to start engaging with our trainee bloggers in Bangladesh through the new outreach blog.