ROLE OF WOMEN FOR FOOD SECURITY AND ENVIRONMENT IN BANGLADESH

Summary

Empowering women has multiple benefits for women themselves and for their families and communities. In Bangladesh, rural women are involved in different income generating activities. As a result, their empowerments are increasing beside the food security, environment and nutrition. The main focus of the study was to determine the women empowerment status through the participation for organic agriculture, food security, environment and nutrition, and to examine the selected characteristics of the rural women. Data were collected January to March, 2013 through pre-tested interview schedule from randomly selected 105 respondent from three villages of Pabna Sadar Upazilla. The selected ten characteristics of the rural women were considered as the independent variable while their empowerment status through participation in IGAs was the dependent variable. Majority (67.62 percent) of the women were medium empowered while 12.38 and 20.00 percent were highly and lowly empowered respectively. Among the six indicators or aspects of empowerment the mean participation in decision making of the respondents was the highest (19.46) and access to service providers was the lowest (10.11). The findings also revealed that the mean of contribution to household agriculture activity was 18.25, access to resources was 15.48 and access to information was 14.32. In the study area, majority of the respondent women were middle aged category, illiterate, medium family size, small farm size, medium family income, medium agricultural knowledge, short training experience, medium socio-economic status, medium attitude and very slight fatalistic category.