C T Online Desk: It is important to involve women in the public domain more safely so they can avail themselves of a wider range of opportunities, experts said at a webinar on Wednesday.
Women’s responsibility as service providers in Bangladesh are quite important in breaking down barriers to women’s mobility and opportunity, said Prof Naila Kabeer of Gender and Development at the London School of Economics.
“The only way we could get these services to women is through other women. I can see women taking responsibility and some progress has been made. It is also quite an important way to bring them into the mainstream of development. Until that point and even until today if not on the margins but really on the sidelines,” she said.
The roundtable session, “Brac@50: What Can We Learn from the World’s Largest NGO?”, was organized by the Development Studies Association (DSA) as a pre-conference webinar before the DSA 2022 Annual Conference.
It brings together leading experts on Brac to share critical lessons of Brac’s 50 years in building a southern approach to development—focusing on the economic and social empowerment of poor women and men through the transfer of resources and capacity-building—for promoting beneficial policy and norms changes.
On the topic “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: A Critical Reflection on the Quiet Revolution”, Marty Chen, an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, said: “Women are the agents of change. Since its inception Brac has been working with women in poor households and women remain the prime focus.
“Women were excluded from the mainstream labor force and leadership position,” said Chen, also a senior advisor to the WIEGO Network.
She talked about how Brac had contributed significantly to women’s empowerment in Bangladesh.
Tamara Abed, managing director of Brac Enterprises and chair of Brac University Board of Trustees, explained why Brac had set up social enterprises.
“It is set up to do any one or more of four things—to create livelihoods in rural areas, to create access to the market for the poor, it improves value chains and inputs for enterprises for the poor and it is to increase the income, productivity and assets for the poor,” she said.
Sohela Nazneen, research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, shed light on local patriarchal norms and the effects of wars of culture on women’s empowerment.
Talking about the second generation challenges, Nobonita Chowdhury, director of Preventing Violence Against Women Initiative and Gender Justice and Diversity at Brac, said: “Married women face the most obstacles.”
The last part of the webinar discussed the politics of creating global public goods–stressing the case of Brac’s Ultra Poor Graduation Model.
Panelist Aude Montesquiou, senior advisor of Strategy and Digital Innovations for Scaling Economic Inclusion at the Brac Institute of Governance and Development, emphasised partnership impact in influencing national policy.
Another panelist, Greg Chen, managing director of Brac Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, said: “The success of Brac has several chapters to go with, such as what’s been achieved and what we want to achieve.”
About the graduation, he said: “Graduation has scaled and proliferated in many small experiments. So, the adaptation side of graduation has been a major success.
“Brac in its DNA sees this question in terms of the global number of extreme poverty by that pre-covid number of 100 million households living in extreme poverty. If we think about those terms, graduation has a huge amount left to do. ”
Illustrating government and nongovernment organization relations, Brac Bangladesh Executive Director Asif Saleh said: “It has been quite complimentary in relationship with the government. When Brac started working the state capacity was a lot less. Now, in 2022, there is a lot more capacity Bangladesh has achieved.”
He added: “There are emerging problems like youth unemployment where the government is working and looking for models that they can take upon. There has been a big success regarding model development, selling the model and demonstration through advocacy. The culture of shifting from donor funding to government funding to implement some of the mainstream models has started.”
