Women’s Economic Empowerment:
building evidence for better investments
Bangladesh
During the current phase of our project, we are focusing our research and advocacy efforts on Bangladesh.
Through a mixed-methods approach, we will map international development funding and public expenditure to women’s economic empowerment (WEE), women’s financial inclusion (WFI), and women’s empowerment collectives (WECs) in Bangladesh. Our aim is to produce robust findings on who funds these investments and why as well as how these investments align with interventions that are catalytic for progress. Alongside our findings on funding in Bangladesh, we will produce evidence-based recommendations for international funders and national and sub-national government ministries to improve their collection and publication of data on funding to these areas.
We will be collaborating with national stakeholders and networks to contextualise research and advocacy to ensure that our project builds upon existing knowledge and supports ongoing efforts to move the needle on funding to WEE, WFI and WECs in Bangladesh. We will develop a new tool to track funding to WEE and WFI. Through this and our other research, we aim to enhance collaboration between funders, gender advocates, and policy-makers, all in an effort to increase funding towards WEE at a crucial time during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
If our research is relevant to your area of work or you would like to get in contact with regards to our advocacy efforts please contact our Communications Officer.
*We will be updating this page shortly with research findings and policy recommendations*
Analysis
Country report
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Budget analysis
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Advisory Committee Members
Our multi-stakeholder advisory committee is made up of WEE experts and advocates, feminist economists and policymakers. We aim to work with our advisory committee to ensure our work is appropriately contextualized and aligned with advocacy efforts in Bangladesh to move the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward.
After graduating from Jahangirnagar University, Taposi joined BRAC as a Management Trainee in Microfinance in 2013. Ms. Roy, worked as Regional Manager from January 2015 to April 2017 where her primary responsibilities were to ensure financial inclusion and financial literacy of unserved and underserved women. In May 2017, Taposi moved to the Head Office to lead the gender mainstreaming process in Microfinance as Gender Lead of the program. Along with creating a gender-responsive workplace and promoting women in leadership positions, Ms. Roy is leading a women’s economic empowerment project. She has also been nominated as Safeguarding Champion, Microfinance, BRAC in 2019.
Ashraful Haque is the Country Director of Innovations for Poverty Action, Bangladesh. His expertise is in designing and managing rigorous field experiments. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Jahangirnagar University. Mr Haque managed more than 30 Randomized Control Trials (RCT) some of which were published in peer-reviewed journals. As the Country Director, he advises a few government agencies including Aspire to Innovate Program (a2i) in designing and developing evidence-based policies and programs.
Shuvra Chowdhury, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Department of Public Administration, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Before joining the Department of Public Administration at the University of Rajshahi, she had worked in the private banking sector for four years. This has enriched her to the deepest understanding of the dilemma of the public and private sector working processes. Her main areas of academic interest include open data analysis, public and social accountability mechanism, right to information, grievance redress management, public financial change management, and gender studies. She received a fellowship from Prime Minister Office, Government of Bangladesh, and conducted several studies under funding from the University Grants Commission, Bangladesh & Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. She has published extensively in noted international publication houses and journals including Sage Publication Limited and Routledge. Her book Strengthening Local Governance in Bangladesh: Reforms, Participation, and Accountability has been published by Springer (2018). A book chapter titled “Decentralized planning and budgeting as social accountability tools: A study of social accountability in local government in Bangladesh” has been published by Palgrave Macmillan (2019). A new book “Gender Responsive Budgeting in South Asia-Experience of Bangladeshi Local Government” will be made available in November 2021 from Routledge, London.
Farah Kabir has been working with ActionAid Bangladesh as the Country Director since June 2007. Over close to three decades of vast experience in the field of development and research has made her a renowned human rights figure at home and abroad with an uncompromising voice against human rights violations. For her significant contribution to the women’s rights movement of Bangladesh, Farah Kabir won the prestigious “Nawab Ali Chowdhury National Award 2012”. She is the Chair of the Global Board of the Global Network of Disaster Risk Reduction (GNDR) since 2015, a Board Member of Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA) in 2019, a member of the Advisory Committee of Bangladesh’s NDA to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Ms Kabir worked with the British Council for nearly ten years both in Bangladesh and United Kingdom. She is the co-editor of two recent publications namely ‘Discourse Analysis as a Tool for Understanding Gender Identity, Representation and Equality’ and ‘Revealing Gender Inequalities and Perceptions in South Asian Countries through Discourse Analysis’.