Naomi Hossain

Elite Perceptions of Poverty: Bangladesh

Summaries The Bangladeshi national elite are distanced from and unthreatened by poverty and the poor. Medium‐term solutions to poverty, resting on a belief in the importance of ‘increasing awareness’ through education, rather than in direct public action, are favoured. The poor are viewed as homogeneous, and generally deserving. These benign perceptions may not accord direct anti‐poverty action a high priority on the national agenda, but they also suggest little of the fear which can lead to repressive measures against the poor. The authors conclude with a discussion of means through which national elite support for more direct anti‐poverty programmes may be built.

The gender dimensions of the globalization of production

Deals with the impact of economic globalization on female employment and considers new areas of paid employment opened up for women.

School Exclusion as Social Exclusion: The Practices and Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Programme for the Poor in Bangladesh

Abstract Evidence indicates that a much-feted conditional cash transfer programme designed to widen access to basic education in Bangladesh has failed in its aims. The programme is analysed here as an instance of the effort to govern chronic poverty. For the state, education fits within a national project of poverty reduction and creating governable citizens. For the poor, education signals social inclusion and access to the state. Yet class and social distinctions through which state actors ‘see’ poor children result in beneficiary selection practices that routinely exclude the poorest from school, with longer-term adverse effects for their social inclusion and citizenship.

Living through crises : how the food, fuel, and financial shocks affect the poor

The food, fuel, and financial crises that started in 2008 reverberated throughout the global economy, causing job losses; poverty; and economic, financial, and political upheaval in countries all over the world. This book is not about the causes of these crises or the macroeconomic and financial sector issues surrounding their origin, spread, and impact; nor is it about how such crises may be prevented in the future. These are important questions, but they have been dealt with in a large number of books, articles, and even movies. Instead, this book is about the more neglected, mundane, and yet centrally important matter of how people lived through the globalized crises of 2008-11, how these people were affected, and what they did to cope. At the time of writing, in late 2011, global food prices had again spiked, and further waves of fiscal and financial shocks were under way, as world economic growth faltered and the euro area sovereign debt crisis mounted. The timing means this book offers vital insights into how people coped, and how they sometimes did not, at a time when such knowledge is most urgently needed. The theme of the book is likely to have an enduring significance, as it offers a unique glimpse into the experience of living through a new type of systemic shock wave that is globalized, highly contagious, and multifaceted. Systemic shocks of the complexity and scale witnessed from 2008 through 2011 are quite unprecedented in world history, but are predicted to be more frequent in the future (Held, Kaldor, and Quah 2010; Goldin and Vogel 2010). The purpose in writing this book is to make the bottom-up perspectives on globalized crises available to a larger audience. The research presents a unique and largely untold account of how people lived through the severe economic turmoil of recent years, how they were affected, and what they did to cope, lending a voice to affected communities themselves.

Engaging elite support for the poorest? BRAC's Targeted Ultra Poor programme for rural women in Bangladesh

This article draws preliminary lessons from the experience of engaging village elites in support of a BRAC programme for ultra-poor women in rural Bangladesh. It describes the origins, aims, and operation of this programme, which provides comprehensive livelihood support and productive assets to the extreme poor. Based on field research in the rural north-west, the article examines the conditions under which elites can support interventions for the ultra-poor, and the risks and benefits of such engagement. It describes the impact of committees mandated to support ultra-poor programme participants, and attempts to understand the somewhat paradoxical success of this intervention. Conclusions and lessons from the experience involve revisiting assumptions that dominate scholarship and programmes relating to the politics of poverty in rural Bangladesh.

A ‘Lost Generation’? Impacts of Complex Compound Crises on Children and Young People

How has the well‐being of children and young people been affected by the global food, fuel and financial crises that have struck since 2007? This article reports empirical findings from qualitative research in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Yemen and Zambia in 2009 and 2010. Intended to complement the wider body of mainly quantitative evidence, it explores how the subjective and relational dimensions of human well‐being have been affected as children and families have sought to survive and thrive amidst complex, compound crises, and concludes that monitoring their impacts affords important insights into how these foundational experiences could have enduring consequences in the longer term.

Coping and Resilience during the Food, Fuel, and Financial Crises

Abstract This article aggregates qualitative field research from sites in 17 developing countries to describe crisis impacts and analyse how people coped with the food, fuel, and financial crises during 2008–2011. The research uncovered significant hardships behind the apparent resilience, with widespread reports of food insecurity, debt, asset loss, stress, and worsening crime and community cohesion. There were important gender and age differences in the distribution of impacts and coping responses, with women often acting as shock absorbers. The more common sources of assistance were family, friends, community-based and religious organisations with formal social protection and finance less important. The traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted as the crisis deepened, pointing to the need for better formal systems for coping with future shocks.

The Social Impacts of Crisis: Findings from Community-Level Research in Five Developing Countries

A year on from research into the impacts of the food, fuel and financial crises in five developing countries, researchers returned to eight of the ten original communities to study how the global downturn had played out over the last year. This report is based on qualitative research undertaken between February and April 2010 in one rural and one urban community in each of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Yemen and Zambia.

The Politics of What Works: The Case of the Vulnerable Group Development Programme in Bangladesh

This paper explores the political dimensions of the achievements of the Vulnerable Group Development (VGD) programme in Bangladesh, a large-scale programme of resource transfers and development interventions targeted at the poorest women, which has been in place since 1974. It focuses on documenting how political ideologies, interests and alliances at national and local levels have influenced the establishment, evolution and maintenance of the VGD programme. It also attempts to show how research and development ideologies and actors beyond the immediate domestic political scene have shaped the programme’s successes.The paper is based on a review of the programme literature, stakeholder interviews, and on other recent empirical research into the politics of poverty in rural Bangladesh.Section 2 summarises how the VGD programme works and evidence of its impact. Section 3 looks at the political context in which the VGD programme emerged and evolved, and Section 4 at the ideological conditions and research and knowledge about poverty that shaped its origins and evolution. Section 5 discusses the roles of the Executive, donors, NGOs and local political leaders, while Section 6 looks more closely at the political dimensions of key features of how the programme works, focusing on corruption, leakage and bias in beneficiary selection. Section 7 concludes with a brief discussion of the extent to which the VGD has helped establish reasonable expectations among the population of official support for the ultra poor, as a form of social or political contract between the state and the poorest people.

National Discourses on Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh: Continuities and Change

This paper explores how these perceptions and narratives around women’s empowerment have evolved in Bangladesh from 2000 to date. It studies the concepts of women’s empowerment in public discourse and reviews the meanings and uses of the term by selected women’s organisations, donor agencies, political parties and development NGOs. By reviewing the publicly available documents of these organisations, the paper analyses the multiple discourses on women’s empowerment, showing the different concepts associated with it and how notions such as power, domains and processes of empowerment are understood by these actors. It also highlights how these different discourses have influenced each other and where they have diverged, with an emphasis on what these divergences mean in terms of advancing women’s interests in Bangladesh.