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Empowering Women on the Chars: Increasing Resilience to Disasters and Building Sustainable Livelihoods



Author(s)

Matthew Pritchard¹, Arifur Rahman² and Mahbub Alam¹

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DOI:10.17265/2161-6256/2015.04.003

1. Chars Livelihoods Programme, Rural Development Academy Campus, Sherpur, Bogra 5842, Bangladesh
2. Department for International Development (DFID), British High Commission, Road 3 United Nations Road, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

The Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP)’s response has been to provide a comprehensive package of support, which aims to increase resilience to disasters and build women’s empowerment. In 2012, CLP developed an innovative approach to monitor women’s empowerment. Understanding that empowerment is context specific, therefore CLP used qualitative approaches to understand how char households define empowerment. From this research, CLP developed a set of 10 (community and household level) indicators, which made up the chars empowerment scorecard. Results show that CLP has a considerable impact on women’s empowerment. They also show that CLP has impacts at both the household and community level, driven by two main factors: increased knowledge (through social development training) and increased wealth (through CLP’s Asset Transfer Project). Further, impacts on empowerment are seen to occur relatively quickly and sustain over time. The effects of climate change are only likely to further compound problems for char-dwellers. By increasing women’s empowerment, CLP is confident that they will be better able to build sustainable livelihoods and increase their resilience to future disasters.

Gender, empowerment, livelihoods, sustainability, Bangladesh.