Simeen Mahmud, Nirali Shah, Stan Becker
Women’s empowerment is a dynamic process that has been quantified, measured and described in a variety of ways. We measure empowerment in a sample of 3500 rural women in 128 villages of Bangladesh with five indicators. A conceptual framework is presented, together with descriptive data on the indica...
Shahidur R. Khandker, Zaid Bakht, Gayatri Koolwal
A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into househo...
Audrie Lin, Benjamin F. Arnold, Sadia Afreen, Rie Goto et al.
We assessed the relationship of fecal environmental contamination and environmental enteropathy. We compared markers of environmental enteropathy, parasite burden, and growth in 119 Bangladeshi children (≤ 48 months of age) across rural Bangladesh living in different levels of household environmenta...
Robert E. Black, Kenneth H. Brown, Stan Becker
Village-based surveillance data from longitudinal studies in rural Bangladesh have been used to evaluate the nutritional consequences of infectious diseases, including diarrhea due to specific pathogens. The prevalences of specific illnesses were related to the ponderal and linear growth of young ch...
Rachel Heath, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from fact...
Naila Kabeer
Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as...
Naila Kabeer, Simeen Mahmud
Abstract Economic liberalization in Bangladesh has led to the emergence of a number of export‐oriented industries, of which the manufacture of ready‐made garments is the most prominent. The industry currently employs around 1.5 million workers, the overwhelming majority of whom are women. This paper...
Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Narayan Das, Selim Gulesci et al.
Abstract We study how women's choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty. To do this we conduct a large-scale randomize...
Sidney Ruth Schuler, Syed Hashemi, Ann P. Riley
Lisa C. Smith, Timothy R. Frankenberger
Binayak Sen
Mark M. Pitt, Shahidur R. Khandker
Group-based lending programs for the poor have become a focus of attention in the development community over the last several years. To date, there has been no comprehensive investigation of their impact on household behavior that has been sufficiently attentive to issues of endogeneity and self-sel...
Sidney Ruth Schuler, Syed Hashemi, Shamsul Huda Badal
Using data from a recent ethnographic study in rural Bangladesh to explore relationships between men's violence against women in the home, women's economic and social dependence on men, and microcredit programmes, this paper suggests that microcredit programmes have a varied effect on men's violence...
Andrew Thorne‐Lyman, Natalie Valpiani, Kai Sun, Richard D. Semba et al.
In Bangladesh, rice prices are known to be positively associated with the prevalence of child underweight and inversely associated with household nongrain food expenditures, an indicator of dietary quality. The collection of reliable data on household expenditures is relatively time consuming and re...
Katsushi S. Imai, Md. Shafiul Azam
Abstract The study examines whether loans from microfinance institutions (MFI) reduce poverty in Bangladesh drawing upon the nationally representative household panel with four rounds from 1997 to 2004. The effects of general microfinance loans and loans for productive purposes on income, food consu...