Women-focused interventions have been a dominant feature of the global development agenda for more than two decades. In response, NGO projects in Bangladesh have done much to promote higher education for girls and help women develop skills for employment. However, based on personal experience of evaluating NGO projects Tasmiah T. Rahman argues that women’s empowerment and participation in the workforce remains limited by patriarchal mindsets.
NGOs and gender policies
Bangladesh is a land of NGOs. It is the birthplace of the world’s largest NGO. Arm and the home of Nobel Prize-winning banker to the poor, Muhammad Yunus. It is also the pseudo-home of several major international NGOs. A generous amount of donor money has met the demands of local NGOs which have expanded over the past three decades, aiming to improve the lives of the poor, most recently with a particular focus on women.
At the 1995 Beijing Conference it was proclaimed that 70% of women lived in poverty and since then interventions focused on women have become an important part of the global development agenda, for example in the IMF initiative. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and the UN Millennium Development Goals.
Bangladesh quickly became a space where global gender mainstreaming policies became part of project designs as “cross-cutting” issues. Motivated by the funding opportunities associated with the shift in focus, the women-centred approach filtered down from the global to the national and local levels in the form of specific project interventions, a discourse to be learned and beneficiary numbers to be included in the logical framework.
The good and the bad
This practice had some success, as reported by UNDP in 2013Bangladesh has achieved greater growth in the Human Development Index compared to its neighbors by increasing girls’ access to higher education, increasing women’s access to employment, and mainstreaming gender equality in the public sphere.
While NGOs are quick to take credit for gender equality in the more visible public sphere, they are rather indifferent when it comes to addressing gender issues in the personal sphere. Gender-based violence and sexual harassment remain rampant; according to UnicefIn 2011, the country was cited as having the fourth highest rate of child marriages in the world. While there have been sporadic campaigns and actions against these crimes, the underlying causes have not been questioned.
The government is often blamed for its limited role in implementing laws against domestic violence or abuse against women. But NGOs’ limited focus on some donor-favored areas of gender mainstreaming, without due consideration of other important ones, has not solved basic equality issues for women. Several feminist researchers, including Sylvia’s Song It has been argued that increased access to income has not changed the power dynamics in households, but that women have become even more burdened. Some have even shown that women’s access to paid work and microcredit is a cause of violence.
A personal experience
I worked on a skills development project in Bangladesh as a monitoring and evaluation staff member for an international NGO. The project was designed to train urban and rural youth in marketable skills for future employment in the local market.
A great deal of effort was put into training women so that they could earn money in the future. While traditional trades such as sewing and tailoring attracted more women, a new trade known as “beautician” also gained popularity among them. Training in non-traditional trades such as domestic electrical wiring or carpentry was promoted for women as that would mean mainstreaming the gender perspective in the labour market. However, barriers induced by the patriarchal mindset came to light after women completed the training and set out to look for work.
During field visits to rural areas, I heard numerous stories of how female graduates struggled at home. One girl told me that despite successfully completing her training, her father did not want her to go out to work. Even when families are facing a severe financial crisis, male family members are skeptical about their female members taking up professional roles. Another graduate confessed that her family is unhappy because she opened her own beauty salon. Her husband threatened her every day to destroy the shop. The reasons for such apprehensive and aggressive attitude of men in families could be women’s lack of security in the public sphere, which makes them feel vulnerable when travelling alone or working in male-dominated environments, as well as long-standing social norms and practices that limit women’s role to household chores. The hostile attitude towards women was also evident outside the home. One training service provider noted that it was not practical to train married women because their husbands would never let them work. The owner of a garment factory told me that he was doing us a favour by hosting women in his factory. According to him, women do not change jobs as often as men, but they are weak and slow and mostly work to find husbands in the factory.
Although circumstances were slightly better in urban areas, problems of harsh working conditions for women and lack of support from family members continued. Women did secure decent jobs after training, especially in garment factories. Documenting their lives, many women shared stories of working 10-hour shifts, or even longer, to earn extra income. While they appreciated the extra income they earned from their jobs, many women confessed that their workload was doubled because they were expected to do all the household chores. Child-rearing also remains largely a woman’s task. Although most women admit that their involvement in household decisions has improved, deeper analysis brought to light issues of insults and abuse when women voiced their concerns. These are just a few examples of the hundreds I heard every day while working in an organization that aimed to empower women through income generation.
The problem
Although progress has been made in empowering women, very little has been done to challenge the mindset of patriarchy. Despite strong criticism, the design of these projects remains top-down and largely focuses on quantifiable measures. While qualitative results are welcome, they are less valuable when evaluating a project. One important change in the monitoring system has been to separate male and female beneficiaries at the activity level. This is positive because it is easier to identify how many women were supported by the project. But the popular approach to gender mainstreaming focuses on income generation with quantifiable outcomes that still ignores complex relationships at home. My project was no different.
Can we expect a change?
Gender strategies must aim for broader societal change, beyond mere income change. Quantifiable numbers are important, but they do not reflect the experiences of women entering the workforce and the impact on complex social structures cannot always be measured. Long-term changes within the power structure will require ongoing advocacy and discussions with community members in local settings. In addition to implementing activities focused on expanding women’s skills and opportunities, NGO workers must promote a change in men’s mindsets in households and workplaces.
There needs to be a trust-based system and an altruistic motive to make these changes. Understandably, gender relations in households are difficult to challenge and change does not happen overnight. However, creating an enabling environment is not too ambitious a goal after three decades of preaching gender-friendly policies. So, rather than ticking a box in a logical framework and saying that women’s empowerment in Bangladesh has been a success, let’s go beyond that box to make current NGO efforts more effective.
Cover image: Yanur Begum, a worker at Wool Tex Sweaters Limited in Shewrapara, Dhaka. Credit: flickr/Asian Development Bank CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License
Note: This article reflects the views of the author and not the position of the South Asia @ LSE blog, the London School of Economics or the institutions mentioned above. Please read our comments policy before posting.
About the Author
Tasmiah Rahman She is currently a Masters student at the Department of Social Policy and Development at the London School of Economics. Prior to this, she worked as an Outcomes Monitoring Manager at an international NGO in Bangladesh.
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