Advancing Gender Equality in Bangladesh: Twenty Years of Brac's Gender Quality Action Learning Programme by Rieky Stuart

Author:Rieky Stuart [Stuart, Rieky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Developing & Emerging Countries, Social Science, Political Science, World, Asian
ISBN: 9781351762991
Google: 6gkqDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35584389
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

There was little focus among the action-learning teams on empowerment-related issues concerning village women’s groups. The teams focused on office-related issues because these were common to men and women staff and they prioritized them. The facilitators were also primarily focused on staff issues. As the GQAL Team leader said, ‘we were interested to see that the staff be empowered to facilitate empowerment at the field level with the VO members, but there was no clear picture of expected outcomes of that thinking’ (GQAL Team leader, personal communication). Perhaps more importantly, this process was unprecedented in that it opened the space for staff to raise their concerns: the gender space became a lightning rod for many issues of power to surface, and it became hard to override the overwhelming desire of staff to address these issues.

As most of the thinking done by the GQAL Team was focused on staff issues, it is not surprising that the facilitators did not have a clear approach to change in the VOs. Some facilitators believed that developing a plan for work with the VOs was beyond their remit and would require management approval. In retrospect, it was important that BRAC first demonstrated that it respected staff concerns (the very staff whom BRAC must depend on to facilitate steps towards women’s empowerment in the villages) and modelled a process which allowed silenced voices to speak. Without this, staff would have been unable or unwilling to make the required leap towards catalysing change at the village level.

When staff chose to focus on gender issues facing village women, they did not venture far beyond existing operating procedures. For example, one Area Office team chose to focus on the issue of men’s poor valuation of women’s household contributions and their participation in BRAC-organized groups. To deal with this, staff lectured male relatives of village women members in ‘issue meetings’ on women’s contributions and exhorted them to value women more.10 Clearly, these village men’s behaviour was rooted in biased gender ideologies and rigid gender roles and power relationships, and exhortation was unlikely to change that.

While staff intuitively understood this dynamic, they were unable to break the mould in finding ways to uncover such barriers and deal with them more effectively. This is not surprising, since there was not much in their experience, either educational or professional, that would have prepared them to innovate and move beyond given parameters. Moreover, people were not looking beyond target achievement to changing power dynamics because they did not know how to do so, and they were not told that this was a priority. At the same time, the rapid expansion of the RDP and the demands of loan recovery prevented the staff from focusing on newer behaviours and actions, learned in the GQAL Programme.

This stands in contrast to the community GQAL, MEJNIN and other gender-transformative programmes, as we explain in the next chapter. These programmes gradually accepted the learning from field staff and institutionalized innovation and learning in their programme design, implementation and monitoring.

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