After achieving economic self-reliance, hundreds of distressed rural women have set up a glaring example in empowering them in northern Bangladesh through contributing a lot towards attaining sustainable social uplift.
These successful women had to live under miseries with their family members due to abject poverty even a decade ago and they are now sending their children to schools though they never thought about education of their kids in the pasts.
At the same time, they have achieved sanitation coverage, raised their voice against social curses like repression, child marriage, dowry, polygamy, superstitions and have adopted proper family planning to reduce population growth rate.
Because of their appreciable awareness, the number of maternal and neonatal deaths, malnutrition of the children, women and pregnant women has also been reduced to the minimum everywhere including remote and hardly reachable char areas.
Talking to BSS, the successful women said it became possible only after attaining economic self-reliance through their hard endevours at their own or under the assistances of various ongoing programmes of the government, NGOs, donor agencies etc.
They expressed confidence that the women could become the driving force in attaining cent percent literacy for their children completely stopping school dropouts if all of the downtrodden womenfolk could be made economically solvent.
Successful women Ful Banu, Parveen, Jasmine, Kohinoor, Chhoki Begum, Rashida and Shyamoli of different Rangpur villages narrated their success stories and stressed for ensuring equal rights of the womenfolk through empowering them economically.
They have achieved success through sewing handloom garments, animal husbandry, rearing poultry birds, plucking green tea leaves, selling their labours as farm- labourers, homestead gardening, farming fruits, spices, fish and agri-activities etc.
Many of them achieved success through farming vegetables on their homesteads and setting up of smaller cottage industries, participatory social afforestation, microcredit activities, VGD and other government programmes. -BSS, Rangpur
