Abstract:
As Bangladesh turns 40, improvements in women’s wellbeing and increased
agency are claimed to be some of the most significant gains in the postindependence
era. Various economic and social development indicators show
that in the last 20 years, Bangladesh, a poor, Muslim‐majority country in the
classic patriarchal belt, has made substantial progress in increasing women’s
access to education and healthcare (including increasing life‐expectancy), and in
improving women’s participation in the labour force. The actors implementing
such programmes and policies and claiming to promote women’s empowerment
are numerous, and they occupy a significant position within national political
traditions and development discourses. In the 1970s and 1980s development
ideas around women’s empowerment in Bangladesh were influenced by an
overtly instrumentalist logic within the international donor sphere. This led to the
women’s empowerment agenda being perceived as a donor driven project, which
overlooks how domestic actors such as political parties, women’s organizations
and national NGOs have influenced thinking and action around it.
This paper explores how these perceptions and narratives around women’s
empowerment have evolved in Bangladesh from 2000 to date. It studies the
concepts of women’s empowerment in public discourse and reviews the
meanings and uses of the term by selected women’s organizations, donor
agencies, political parties and development NGOs. By reviewing the publicly
available documents of these organizations, the paper analyses the multiple
discourses on women’s empowerment, showing the different concepts associated
with it and how notions such as power, domains and processes of empowerment
are understood by these actors. It also highlights how these different discourses
have influenced each other and where they have diverged, with an emphasis on
what these divergences mean in terms of advancing women’s interests in
Bangladesh.
