Published in The Daily Star on Monday, 9 June 2014.
Only bigger budget for women won’t work
Researchers, academics tell discussion, laying importance on specific work plans
Staff Correspondent
The increase in the budgetary allocation for women’s empowerment will not bring any fruit unless the government adopts women-related policies and chart specific work plans, researchers and academicians said yesterday.
“If the government’s idealistic policies are not changed towards women, the increase in allocations in the budget can’t bring expected outcomes,” said Nazneen Ahmed, senior research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS).
She was addressing a discussion, “National Budget 2014-15: Gender Sensitivity”, organised by Steps Towards Development, an NGO, at Dhaka Reporters Unity.
Nazneen said there was currently no information of the achievements of the last few years’ gender-responsive budgets. It is necessary to find areas where women can work, and it needs research, she added.
Khaleda Akhter, senior research associate at civil society think tank Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), said the government was taking different projects for women but there was no specific work plan for their implementation.
Prof Mahbuba Nasreen, director of the Institute of Disaster Management and Vulnerability Studies at Dhaka University, doubted whether there was any coordination between the ministries of forest and environment and disaster management and relief on their expenditures on women.
Kazi Marful Islam, a teacher of development studies at DU, said there should be mechanisms to measure the government’s spending in different sectors, especially on women’s health.
Another DU teacher, Shourav Sikder, observed that the budgetary allocations and other arrangements were mainly for the upper class women, not the marginalised ones.
Earlier, Ranjan Karmakar, executive director of Steps Towards Development, presented a paper highlighting the pros and cons of the allocations for women in the recently placed budget.