Located in one of the world’s most disaster-prone natural environments, Bangladesh exhibit one of the worst profiles of human deprivation. The general picture of misery, however, obscures the inequalities in the distribution human deprivation among sub groups of the poor, in particular among the women. In rural areas, rapidly growing numbers of people are finding themselves without enough land to satisfy their basic needs and without any substantial hope of gainful employment. This fundamental problem of landlessness and unemployment is in large part caused and perpetuated by high population growth, low educational levels and socio-economic power structures resulting in the concentration of productive lands in the hands of a relatively small number of wealthy households. In a situation of increasing landlessness, high rates of unemployment, natural disaster threats, especially women as well as men have been compelled to live with poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy and homelessness.
Women, however, most acutely feel human misery everywhere in the country, because they additionally face cultural forces, which severally impact on every sphere of their lives. Women’s institutionally limited accesses to resources and their excessively high dependence on normatively codified entitlement produce specifically gender-linked differences in the process of impoverishment. Until fairly recently, poverty and underdevelopment were assumed to put all members of affected households –men, women and children –at an equal disadvantage. “Households” were regarded as static entities where labor and resources are pooled and equally shared. The implicit conclusion was that changes thought of as beneficial for development would be neutral in their effects on the different members of the households. Empirical evidence revealed, however, that the costs and benefits of development are often disproportionately distributed, among individual member of the household. Thus, in societies like Bangladesh with a pronounced gender-specific division of labor, which accord women and their work lower status or importance, it cannot be assumed that women will automatically and equally be benefited from an increase in household income due to any development intervention.
This understanding of poverty and development demands a rethinking of development interventions and reshuffling of strategies and initiatives, with a view to addressing the women-specific problems and needs. Although today there is a wider recognition of the importance of women in the process of development, the prevailing nature of interventions toward them is welfare-oriented rather than income-generating ones. Welfare projects, for example, maternal and child health care, family planning, hygiene, nutrition, home economics and kitchen gardening, focus mainly on the domestic role of women as homemakers and child careers, succumbing to the fiction of a constant “household” with a male breadwinner. Such interventions, as important as they are, do not meet with success in getting women out of poverty nor do they alter the fundamental problem of women’s dependence. Income-generating projects (IGPs), in contrast, try to create an environment that helps women to have direct access to resource and technology to support themselves and their families. They involve upgrading existing skills or teaching new ones, providing the resources needed to use the skills in the production of marketable goods and services. In this context, Ashrafun Nahar (Asha), who lives in Tala upazila under Satkhira district established Women Job Creation Centre (WJCC). This organization is based in Satkhira, began working with a small number of destitute women of Tala Upazila in 1990. It started with a mini nursery over an acre of land. Women, organized into group by WJCC, used to produce saplings and sale those in the local market. In 1992, the nursery sold a total of 41000 saplings. Interested group member could buy the saplings at reduced price and could make her own nurseries at their homesteads. This was the first example that ignited a sense of entrepreneurship among the women. Since then, besides promoting wage employment, raising awareness, teaching functional literacy and providing legal aid, WJCC is also encouraging rural women to participate in economy as producers and entrepreneurs. Ms. Midori, a Japanese social worker (1990 – till now) Mr. Sanish P. Chempakasseril, an Australian Social worker (2010 – till now) has contributed a lot for the development of WJCC. Based on the initial success of nursery, WJCC went for diversification and initiated an expansion of activities and devised an integrated strategy involving formation of group, mobilization of savings, formal and informal skill training, provision of credit for income generating activities and marketing of products. WJCC believes that it is possible to overcome the profile weakness of the hardcore poor women by development interventions.