USAID plans to spend up to $6 million To ‘empower’ women in Bangladesh

By Lauretta Brown | CNS News

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is planning to award a $5.5 to $6 million grant to “increase the empowerment of women” in Bangladesh, which includes increasing their “community leadership,” “decision-making” and “time-management” skills and monitoring how they spend their free time. (See USAID Women’s Empowerment.pdf)

The objective of the grant is to increase the empowerment of women in the Feed the Future (FTF) zone of influence in the Barisal and Khulna divisions, and four southern districts of the Dhaka division in the central part of the country over the course of three years, according to USAID.

The grant highlights gender equality problems in Bangladesh’s agricultural sector, where 45 percent of the nation’s population is employed, citing researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative:

“The WEAI (Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index) baseline results for Bangladesh show that only 33 percent of women in the FTF zone are empowered, while more than half do not have gender parity with the primary male in their household.”

at CNS News.com