Women’s Rights to Land in Bangladesh

Roles, Limitations and Transformation

Women play important roles as producers of food, managers of natural resources, income earners, and caretakers of household food and nutrition security but access to and control over land are still confined. Women are primarily responsible for food production but land is owned or controlled by men. Women acquire use rights through relationships to a man— usually a husband or father; maintaining those rights depends on continuing the relationship. As a result, women’s productivity is often constrained because they do not have rights to make decisions, and often cannot get credit without land rights. Just as significantly, women’s dependence on men for use rights reduces their security because they can lose the right to use land if they are widowed or divorced. Women’s control over land is important strategies to empower rural women but still it is limited for them.

LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE LIVING IN POVERTY

ORAL TESTIMONY OF DHAKA SLUM-DWELLERS

The dominant modes of social science epistemology, patterned after the physical sciences, have been grounded mostly in detached, ‘objective’, ‘decontexualised’ and chiefly quantitative approaches. Accordingly, poverty research approaches undervalue the knowledge and experience of people living in poverty, which contributed greatly to faulty understanding of poverty and strategies to change it. Poor people are indeed much more than mere ‘statistical cannon fodder’.1 The search for truth calls for an undetached joint interactive process of subjectively reconstructing and learning from the lived experience of people living in poverty involving both the researcher and the researched. Poverty studies conducted with empathy and respect for the people, with ethical concern and personal accountability, has both legitimacy and academic value, particularly when the subjects of the research are human beings living in poverty.