Students attending universities that are part of the Center's Campus Consortium initiative are eligible for international reporting fellowships through the Pulitzer Center. We'll be featuring their dispatches from the field as their reporting progresses.
Stine Eckert sums up the situation of women in Bangladesh after
two weeks of interviews in Bangladesh: While a shift in the generation
of current adult women and the chances their daughters will have seems
to occur, some professional jobs such as journalism still remain macho
realm.
Although almost two thirds of the laborers in Bangladesh work in agriculture, according to the Bangladeshi Labor Force Survey 2000, there is no minimum pay, no regulated access to health care, and no equal pay between men and women for them.
Despite Bangladesh’s largely agrarian economy and labor laws for industrial and governmental workers, agricultural workers have no legal support. Among them roughly half are women but they do 90% of the work says Rahela Rabbani, a project coordinator at the non-governmental organization Karmojibi Nari in Dhaka. “As they are women their work doesn’t count,” she says. “Often they are not paid in money but food.”
Karmojibi Nari, which means “working women” fights for a law for agricultural workers. Since 1991, Karmojibi Nari educates especially women who work in agriculture about women’s rights, human rights, and the constitution because women are always less informed, says Karmojibi Nari General Secretary Shirin Akhter. After coming home from work, there is little time to obtain such information, she says. “It is difficult to create an environment for them to learn in a male-dominated chauvinistic climate,” she adds. “Women don’t feel supported.”
On one hand Karmojibi Nari lobbies at the political level to create a law, on the other hand its workers train women to organize themselves and to become leaders in their communities in four of the six administrative divisions of Bangladesh. They start on the grassroots level with small groups called cells. Each cell consists of 25 to 30 members.
Since 2005 Karmojibi Nari works in the district of Manikganj, west of Dhaka. By now 88 cells exist. Since January 2009 three cells have gathered in the 600-people village of Kosavanga, two for women and one for men. Stine Eckert has visited Kosavanga and its women.
The last decade women have managed to get jobs in traditionally male sectors such as the garment industry and non-governmental organizations, says chair and professor in the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism of Dhaka University, Dr. Gitiara Nasrin, but despite an early start in the mid-1940s of women in journalism in Bangladesh little progress has been made over the past half century. There are a little more in electronic rather than print media, she says, but overall women in media make up less than a quarter of journalists."It's a shame," Dr. Nasrin says and explains the reasons that keep women from working in media.
It was the first woman-to-woman race in Faridpur-2, when Shama Obaid Islam ran for a seat in parliament in the December 2008 national election in Bangladesh. A young woman new to politics, Shama Obaid Islam, 36, of the Bangladeshi National Party (BNP) challenged veteran politician 73-year-old Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury of the opposing major party, the Awami League -- and lost. But she says she has lots of time before her and just got started. Next time, she says, she will run again for her constituency of 216,000 people in Faridpur, one of the 64 districts in Bangladesh, southwest of the central capital Dhaka. In an interview she explains the obstacles she's been facing as a female politician in patriachal Bangladesh (part 1 of 2).
Shama Obaid Islam is not only experiencing what is means to be a new face on the scene but also to be a woman in politics in male-dominated Bangladesh. While her late father's image as a popular member of the parliament and former minister boosted her campaign during the 2008 national election, it also became "frustrating" she says, that the respect people paid her was due to him.
With just eleven paid staff members and an army of 200 volunteers, Dhaka-based NGO Odhikar has been monitoring the violation of human rights in Bangladesh since 1994. Its monthly and annual reports are used by foreign embassies and media to also keep track of violations such as extra-judicial killings, torture as well as rape, dowry, and acid crimes. In 2008 the U.S. State Department honored Odhikar, which means rights in Bengali, with the runner-up prize of its Freedom Defenders award. One of the foci of Odhikar, which rejects donations to stay independent, are violations of women's rights. Odhikar Program Coordinator Sazzad Hussein says it's good that with Sheik Hasina for the Awami League and Begum Khaleda Zia for the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) two females lead the major parties in the country, but being a woman doesn't mean that politics change for the rest of the female population. Despite repeated attempts to initiate projects to advance women little has changed in politics over the past 15 years he says in an interview (part 1 of 3).
"Acid crimes are a common phenomenon in Bangladeshi," says Sazzad Hussein, program coordinator of human rights watchdog NGO Odhikar. But acid violence is also one of the crimes that has decreased over the past 15 years, along with rape, because he says, awareness campaigns by NGOs and some government effort helped to raise the voices of the people against these kinds of violence.
Lack of control over their own reproductive rights and self-earned money are just a couple of obstacles among many, which many Bangladeshi women still have to overcome. But without tackling patriarchy itself, change will only happen on the surface, says United Nations Development Program Gender Expert Majeda Haq, Part 2
On the backdrop of a constitution which includes an article that is "a little bit faulty in terms of achieving gender equaltiy" and a two-fold Muslim and Hindu patriarchal culture in place, United Nations Development Program Gender Expert Majeda Haq, explains the uphill battle women face in Bangladesh. She says it will take at least two more generations before society will change. Part 1 of 2
With astonishment students at the women studies department at
Dhaka University witnessed how easy it is for a boy to get away with
physically abusing a girl on campus. First-year master student Aumio
Srizan Samya, 25, tells the story.
Increasingly more boys are joining the group of about 30 students per semester who enter the women studies program at Dhaka University, the number one university in Bangladesh. One of them is 25-year old Aumio Srizan Samya who has started his master's in women studies after completing a four-year bachelor in the department. He says his academic field of interest has caused some surprise for parts of his family.
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