By the beginning of 2012, the Disaster Management Bureau (DMB) will team up with the country’s largest mobile phone provider Grameenphone, and state-run mobile phone company Teletalk, to provide early warnings for cyclones and floods to all 14 coastal districts. “We identified mobile phones as an effective medium for disaster risk reduction in Bangladesh since the number of people using mobile phones in rural areas of the country is increasing,” Ahsan Zakir, director-general of the DMB, told IRIN. On a separate project, Airtel [joint venture Bharti Airtel & Warid Telecom], another private mobile operator, has teamed up with the Campaign for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods (CSRL), the Center for Global Change (CGC) and two international NGOs, Oxfam and CARE, to provide early weather warnings to fishermen at sea using the company’s global positioning system (GPS).