Bijan Lal Dev :
As “women’s empowerment”, a popular phenomenon of the 21st century, has become an important phrase, the governments, right groups and international organizations have been pushing it forward. It has got a special attention to the world leaders and, thus, they specifically included it as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and indirectly in at least another two MDGs in the UN-sponsored Millennium Summit in 2000. Fortunately, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was one of the framers of the MDGs who had attended the Summit as then the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Since then, countries including Bangladesh have been implementing multi-directional programs to achieve the goal and most countries have made spectacular progress in empowering women and gender equality.
However, the world needs to do much more. Ideally, women are sound, fast, and excellent finishers They are a force for change. Women are easy to get along with household affairs, agriculture, workplace, civil society, intellectual arena and professionalism. In reality, women have been deprived equally in modern, poor and orthodox societies of everything they deserve to get. In agriculture, women, across the world, make up more than 40 percent of the labor force, but only represent 3 to 20 percent of landholders. In Africa, women-owned enterprises make up as little as 10 percent of all businesses, and in South Asia, they are only 3 percent. Despite representing half the global population, women comprise less than 20 percent of the world legislators. Women still comprise two-thirds of the illiterate across the world. And, the World Bank estimates that half of the out-of-school girls in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa and one quarter of them live in South Asia. Violence against women is common in all societies. Every year, at least two million women and girls are trafficked into prostitution, forced slavery and servitude. Gender-based violence hurts women and their families, and it reinforces inequalities between men and women throughout the world.
Have we been erase these inequalities and put women on equal footing with men, we would be able to unlock human potential on a transformational scale. Just by empowering women farmers with the same access to land, new technologies and capital as men, we can increase crop yields by as much as 30 percent and feed additional 150 million people globally.
Emphasizing on the importance of women to develop the economy and change the society, Bangladesh has made a phenomenal success in women’s empowerment and eliminating gender disparity in all areas, especially during the last five years. The Government has taken a good number of programs to
promote and develop curricula and opportunities for women in business, agriculture and education in order to increase women’s access to higher education and advanced degrees, strengthen institutional capacity in research and education on women’s leadership through higher education extension and outreach to underserved communities.
Female education has, thereby, been encouraged to empower women and to increase their involvement in the socio-economic activities through providing girls with free education up to higher secondary school, monthly stipends to 11.90 million students of poor and needy families and also free textbooks to all up to the secondary level. 133,000 girl students at the tertiary education are now included in the stipend program since 2013 as an investment that will pay dividends for generations to come. It increases the gender parity index (GPI) in the tertiary education to 0.8 in 2013 from 0.3 in 2008. GPI reached at 1.10 in 2011 in primary education and 1.13 in secondary education. As a result, share of women in wage employment in non-agriculture sector reached at 42 percent in 2013 as the government has created huge scope for women employment in garments and other industrial and service sectors. Besides, the government has taken initiatives to develop women entrepreneurship especially in small and medium enterprises. For this, the government has been providing interest-free loan and training to women entrepreneurs. Education is thus critically important to peace, prosperity and empowerment.
The Government has taken initiatives to ensure that women have a real voice in all governance institutions, from the judiciary to the civil service, as well as in the private sector and civil society, so that they can participate equally with men in public dialogue and decision-making and influence the decisions that will determine the future of their families. The government’s policies have also helped grow women leaders at the grass-root to the topmost level. In politics, so far 14,000 women are elected to the local government bodies and 69 to the present Tenth Parliament. It was 70 in the Ninth Parliament. Bangladesh is possibly the only nation today with women occupying the position of the Prime Minister, the Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Deputy Leader, all at the same time. The reserved 10 percent of posts for women have succeeded many to reach high positions in the judicial, administrative, finance, diplomatic and in the armed forces and law enforcing agencies. Women police and armed forces earned reputation in the UN peace keeping missions in distant lands. Child and women mortality rates have been reduced drastically.
The country has performed quite well in halting communicable diseases. Thus Bangladesh has almost met or in the right track to meet targets set in MDG 1 to MDG 6. Social awareness programs have also been geared up to ensuing social, economical and political empowerment of women. Besides, the enforcement of Women & Children Repression Prevention Act of 2000 and Family Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act of 2010 has been ensured. The Constitution of Bangladesh also discourage the gender discrimination as it states in the Article 28 (2) that “Women shall have equal rights with men in all spheres of the State and of public life.”
Bangladesh has now become a role model in the developing world not only for its speedy socio-economic development but also for women’s empowerment. The developing world should follow suit as it is imperative to integrate gender equality and women’s empowerment into poverty reduction, good governance, crisis prevention and recovery and environment and sustainable development. We should steer the trend forward to ensure expected equal contribution of women to the nation development. No one should be bystander.
—PID – Feature
