Women's empowerment revisited : from individual to collective power among the export sector workers of Bangladesh

Bangladesh has become known as something of a success in advancing gender equality since the 1990s. There have been rapid gains in a number of social and economic domains, yet by most objective standards the current condition and status of women and girls within Bangladeshi society remain low. Rapid progress has come about under conditions of mass poverty and interlocking forms of social disadvantage, political instability and underdevelopment, overlain with persistent ‘classic’ forms of patriarchy. Mass employment of women and girls in the country’s flagship export sector – the readymade garments (RMG) sector – has been one of the more visible and prominent changes in women’s lives since its late 1970s’ introduction. Whether and the extent to which RMG or garments employment has changed the lives of women workers for the better has been the subject of much debate, and the research and analysis it has generated offers valuable insights into the processes of economic and social empowerment for poor women in low income developing countries. Yet as this paper notes, close observers of social change in Bangladesh have become dissatisfied with the limits of a focus on individual economic empowerment. Paid work may enable some women to negotiate the ‘structures of constraint’ that shape their lives and relationships, but what of the structures of constraint themselves? In the Bangladesh context the experience of mass RMG employment has given rise to questions about whether women have gained greater recognition as citizens with rights and roles as carers in the private and political actors within the public spheres. Revisiting the question of women’s empowerment in this context means interrogating whether paid employment has contributed to investments in the education and skills of women and girls, improvements in their public safety and rights to occupy public space. Given labour militancy in the sector and its partial successes in raising the minimum wage, what has the experience of labour politics meant for women’s political empowerment? Drawing mainly on the rich literature available on women’s RMG employment, this paper explores the wider and less well-documented effects of such employment on public policy relating to gender equality in these areas. It concludes that the overall direction of change in the industry points plainly to the need for investments in worker productivity, with a host of implications for women’s work and gender equality more broadly. Factory owners have to date shown few signs of recognising their interests in supporting better state health, education and public safety for women and girls, or changing management practices to retain and raise productivity of skilled women workers. Yet with downward pressure on wages increasingly effectively resisted by workers at a time of global economic volatility and rising living costs, the tide may now be turning for the RMG workers of Bangladesh. Productivity gains require the state and the industry to treat women workers as full citizens with public policies that promote their skills and safety and respect, and which guarantee the representation of their rights and demands. RMG employment continues to be a source of empowerment for women in Bangladesh, but social and economic change means that that power now depends less on the individual economic effects of paid work on household decision-making than it once did. RMG employment is increasingly a source of power for women because of its more collective effects on women’s citizenship and political agency. This matters all the more because of how this group is exposed to the volatilities of the global economy

How do Bangladesh Elites Understand Poverty?

The poverty of most Bangladeshis is viewed as an important - but not urgent - issue by Bangladesh's elites. They do not feel threatened by the extent of poverty, or by poor people. Some sections of the elite appear to know little about the poor. The poor are instead viewed through a somewhat idealistic lens, as homogenous, deserving objects of traditional elite philanthropy. Poverty alleviation is at one level viewed as a moral project. At another level it is synonymous with the broader, technical project of development: development will solve the problem eventually, without any special focus on the poor. The state is expected to provide education for the poor, but not to act in any more direct way to protect their livelihoods. The proper role of the state is to promote development in the broad sense, not to ensure that the poor are fed

Them Belly Full (But We Hungry): Food Rights Struggles in Bangladesh, India, Kenya

This report synthesises the findings from the four country case studies produced for the project. It is intended as a summary introduction to the main findings of the research, and a preliminary comparative analysis across the four cases. Further analysis and more outputs, blogs, papers and books and follow-up research are planned. Please visit http://foodriots.org for more information

From Global to Local and Back Again: Researching Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility

This article sets out the thinking behind the research methodology used in the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility project. It sets out the key questions and aims, describes the approach, and explains why we chose the research design we did. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology, and concludes with reflections on the (increasingly important) question of how to research social change in a globalising era

Excerpts from Focus Group Discussions: Bangladesh

The focus groups on which these excerpts are based were conducted in 2007 as part of research by the BRAC Research and Evaluation Division with Save the Children UK Bangladesh support into perceptions and practices of child labour, conducted in Nilphamari and Karail in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Further details of the research are available in S. Tariquzzaman and E. Kaiser (2008) Employers’Perceptions of Changing Child Labour Practices in Bangladesh , BRAC Research and Evaluation Division monograph 35, Dhaka: BRAC?RED ( http://www.bracresearch.org/monographs/Monograph_35%20.pdf )

Rude accountability in the unreformed state : informal pressures on frontline bureaucrats in Bangladesh

‘Rude’ forms of accountability are central to how poor people negotiate their entitlements on the frontline of service delivery in Bangladesh. This paper documents the unorganised, informal pressures that poor citizens exert on officials in a context where effective formal systems for accountability are absent, and the state remains unreformed in key respects. The paper explores the impact of ‘rude accountability’ on services, as well as their limitations and the consequences for formal accountability systems. Based on extensive research into how poor people experience safety nets, schools and health services, the paper argues that strong social and local political pressures go some way towards supplying a rough responsiveness to demands for service. These work through shame and embarrassment, pressures to maintain reputation and status, and the threat of violence. Poor people have good reasons to use these methods in preference to formal accountability mechanisms. And poor women may have a particularly strong comparative advantage in doing so – not because they are so much better than men or rich people at complaining and shaming, but because it is comparatively less difficult for them to do so than to engage in more formally structured means of complaint or feedback. The idea of rude accountability is seductive: when formal governance systems fail, the idea that there are informal mechanisms that are better suited to context and culture is intrinsically attractive. Yet the paper concludes that the gains from rude accountability are often short-lived and may backfire, as public officials fear and resist efforts to enable citizen participation in holding them to account. There are features of contemporary Bangladeshi state-society relations that lend themselves to informal means of accountability, the analysis here of informal accountability mechanisms has wider implications for the move towards citizen involvement in performance-based accountability in other contexts. Keywords: accountability, Bangladesh, bureaucracy, education, gender, governance, health, social protection, politics, poverty

Delivering Social Protection that Nourishes: Lessons from the Food Price Crisis

The global food crisis of 2007–11 brought about lasting changes to the relationship between the work people do and the food they eat. Real-time research conducted by IDS, Oxfam and research partners in ten focus countries has found the cost of these changes has gone uncounted. Higher food prices have led to more precarious work and changing diets, with variable developmental and nutritional impacts. Social protection policies and programmes should protect the social aspects of life – the unpaid care work of nourishing families that is mainly shouldered by women, and the non-monetary value of traditional crops and cuisines – against market uncertainties. They need to ensure a balance between the work people do and the subsistence it affords them. To help them do this, better data are needed on informal economies, changing food habits and how unpaid care work is being affected by women’s changing economic roles

Inequality, Hunger, and Malnutrition: Power matters

The uneven distribution of hunger and nutrition reflects the unequal distribution of power in the food system. In its hourglass shape, the power at the center amplifies poverty and marginalization at both ends of the system: at one end, small-scale farmers and low-paid food producers suffer hardship; at the other end, those excluded from or adversely incorporated into globalized food markets face hunger and malnutrition. Transnational corporations’ growing control over what we eat—which often deepens existing inequalities—has generated a wide range of spaces and forms of resistance. Power analysis encourages us to look beyond the obvious and the measurable, to trace the effects of interests operating at multiple levels of the food system, to find opportunities where and when they arise, and to enter spaces where that power can be challenged, resisted, and redistributed. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals’ aim of “leaving no one behind” demands approaches to hunger and malnutrition that are both more sensitive to their uneven distribution and more attuned to the power inequalities that amplify the effects of poverty and marginalization in all forms of malnutrition

Beyond Silos: Complex Global Shocks and the New Challenges for Civil Society

Events since 2008 have crystallised a view that global economic shocks are more likely, more complex and more contagious than in the past. Public sector spending (including aid) has been shrinking since the economic crisis, while poverty and inequality have risen in both developed and developing countries. Yet the space for new understandings of how the world economy does – and should – work, remains empty, and emerging institutions of global governance are undemocratic and non?participative. Drawing on debates taking place within civil society in the aftermath of the crisis, this article identifies the need to reimagine the way civil society works in this changed and challenging context: the challenges include moving beyond organisational ‘silos’ to address cross?cutting issues at their source, to amplify the voice of those directly affected, influence a fairer policy response and fertilise debate about how the global economy should work, and for whom

Anatomy of coping: evidence from people living through the crises of 2008-11

This paper surveys qualitative crisis monitoring data from sites in 17 developing and transition countries to describe crisis impacts and analyze the responses and sources of support used by people to cope. These crises included shocks to export sectors as a result of the global financial crisis, as well as food and fuel price volatility, in the period from 2008 to early 2011. Respondents reported the crisis had resulted in significant hardships in the form of foregone meals, education, and health care, food insecurity, asset losses, stress, and worsening crime and community cohesion. Although the export-oriented formal sector was most exposed to the global economic downturn, the crises impacts were more damaging for informal sector workers, and some of the adverse impacts will be long-lasting and possibly irreversible. There were important gender and age differences in the distribution of impacts and coping responses, some of which diverged from what has been seen in previous crisis coping responses. The more common sources of assistance were family, friends, and community-based and religious organizations; formal social protection and finance were not widely cited as sources of support in most study countries. However, as the crisis deepened, the traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted because of the large and long-lasting shocks that ensued, pointing to the need for better formal social protection systems for coping with future shocks.