Community perception toward women empowerment in rural local government in Bangladesh: a case study of Jhenaidah sadar thana

Abstract

To bring meaningful social changes and improved quality of life in Bangladesh - both men and women should get equal opportunities and positions complementing each other in every sphere of life. Though the Constitution has guaranteed that there should not be any discrimination between men and women on gender basis and provisions are also included to ensure equal rights, yet, political empowerment remained elusive and representation of women in state legislatures remained very low. In the absence of proportional representation even after three decades of independence, it became imperative that reservations of women seats on proportionate basis should be accepted as a starting point to bring women into the mainstream of political activity. In this circumstances, the recent amendments to the Union Parishad Ordinance (1997) - the provision for direct election of women to one-third reserved seats in the Union Parishad have changed the women representation scenario at the local level. In the 1997 Union Parishad election more than 44,134 female candidates contested in 12,828 seats with 1000 women competing for the general seats in 4,276 unions. Out of that, 26 female candidates were elected chairmen (the number has increased up to 29 through by election). This massive participation of women in elections to a political institution is a landmark in the institutionalization of women in politics. This study therefore, attempts to highlight and analyze the community's perception towards these women members in local government and how far these women members are fulfilling their expectations. It also analyzes the reason as to why the female members are failing to serve as agents for bringing changes in the life of rural women. The study emphasizes on communities opinion for finding out the means to improve women's social, legal and even economic status in the study area. During this study, it is observed that maximum women respondents in the study area are having minimum literacy. Now they are more thoughtful about their future and are anxious to get vocational training and different development programs to improve their quality of lives. Though the female members could not satisfy the expectation of the community women, yet most of these women believe that the female members can bring changes in their lives. They strongly believe that the female members can solve their social problems by playing an important role in village Shalish. The women in the study area have opined for wider participation of the poor and other women in the decision making level and demanded the female members to ensure corrective effort to make the best use of resources in the interests of the poor especially the women. On the other hand the female members in the study area are in a disadvantageous position as they have to work against the male dominated traditional system. Male members are not enthusiastic to extend their co-operation to the female members. Some time they create obstruction for female members to utilize their constitutional rights. Moreover, weak educational and lower social status make themselves less confident about their rights. At the same time the male members and the local people neglect their decisions as well. At the end, from the community point of view, we can conclude that to empower the female members in rural local government, it is a must to bring constitutional changes to give these female members equal power in response to male members and there has to be a equal power balance in rural Local Government.