Adolescent girls in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district meet once a week to discuss their rights. Here they talk about sanitation and personal hygiene. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
RANGPUR, Bangladesh, Aug 25 2014 (IPS)

Until five years ago, Shima Aktar, a student in Gajaghanta village in the Rangpur district of Bangladesh, about 370 km northwest of the capital Dhaka, was leading a normal life. But when her father decided that it was time for her to conform to purdah, a religious practice of female seclusion, things changed.

The young girl, now 16 years old, says her father pulled her out of school at the age of 11 and began to lay plans for her marriage to an older man “for her own protection” he said.

Born to a hardline Muslim family, pretty, shy Shima might have taken these changes in stride – were it not for the support of a local youth advocacy group.

Called ‘Kishori Abhijan’, meaning ‘Empowering Adolescents’, the project is a brainchild of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and educates young people on a range of issues, from gender roles, sex discrimination and early marriage, to reproductive health, personal hygiene and preventing child labour.

“The absence of political will, conceptual clarity, appropriate institutional arrangements and allocation of adequate resources are challenges to the achievement of substantive equality between women and men […].” -- Shireen Huq, founding member of Naripokkho, a leading women's rights NGO
Now that she knows her rights, Shima is fighting hard to assert them, joining a veritable army of young women around this country of 160 million who are determined to change traditional views about gender.

Besides the Empowering Adolescents initiative, other grassroots schemes to educate communities on the rights of women include groups that practice interactive popular theatre (IPT), designed to address social issues at a local level.

Using a mix of popular folk tales and traditional songs and dancing, the actors perform for their parents, local officials and other influential community members, determined to have their voices heard by breaking out of the box.

The Centre for Mass Education in Science (CMES), an NGO working in a remote part of the Rangpur district, recently put on a public performance to illustrate the need to abolish the dowry system, and boost female participation in the public workforce.

Thousands of women here live under the shadow of dowry-related violence. The Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) reported some years ago that the practice of dowry leads to torture, acid attacks and sometimes even murder and suicide.

The year 2011 saw 330 deaths of women in dowry-related violence. The previous year 137 women were killed for the same reason, according to the largest women’s rights NGO, Bangladesh Mahila Parishad. The NGO also reported 439 cases of dowry-related violence in 2013.

Very often, women are either killed or commit suicide when they are unable to pay the full price of the dowry.

Mohammed Rashed of CMES believes that educating people as to the impacts of traditional practices and ideas can stem such unnecessary tragedies.

“By involving parents, teachers, community and religious leaders and government officials in awareness campaigns we have been able to bring positive changes,” he told IPS.

Already, efforts to spread awareness are bearing fruit. According to UNICEF, some 600,000 adolescents around the country, 60 percent of them girls, are now educated on issues like the legal marriage age of boys and girls, as well as the importance of education and family planning, as a direct result of grassroots advocacy.

Between 64 and 84 percent of adolescents interviewed by the Dhaka-based NGO Unnayan Onneshan claimed that dowry practice had decreased in their communities since 2010.

Policies driven by demands to increase girls’ education have also enabled a much higher rate of female participation in schools.

In 1994 the government introduced the Female Secondary School Stipend Programme – funded by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Norwegian government – that offered adolescent girls a small amount of money every six months to stay in school.

Although urban and rural disparities still exist, the average primary school enrollment rate for girls is now as high as 97 percent, one of the highest in the developing world.

The field of reproductive health and rights has also witnessed improvements. The presence of skilled birth attendants in rural areas has increased from less than five percent in the early 90s to 23 percent today, while contraceptive use among women has dramatically increased from a mere eight percent in 1975 to about 62 percent in 2011.

Despite these achievements, girls still lag behind their male counterparts throughout much of the country.

Child mortality, for instance, remains much higher among females than males, with 16 deaths per 1,000 live births for boys and 20 deaths per 1,000 live births for girls, according to a 2010 study by Unnayan Onneshan.

World Bank data from 2010 shows that 57 percent of women participate in the labour force, while men show a much higher rate of employment, at 88 percent.

Shireen Huq, a leading women’s rights activist, told IPS, “Despite the impressive gains, women and girls continue to be discriminated [against]. The result manifests in the unacceptably high number of maternal deaths [and] the dropout rate for girls in secondary schools.”

A 2013 ministry of health report found the maternal mortality rate (MMR) to be 170 deaths per 100,000 live births, down from 574 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990.

Meanwhile, some 66 percent of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18^th birthday, giving the country one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world.

Huq, a founding member of Naripokkho, a leading NGO on the rights of women, also said, “The absence of political will, conceptual clarity, appropriate institutional arrangements and allocation of adequate resources are challenges to the achievement of substantive equality between women and men […].”

Experts believe it is important to involve women at every level of decision-making, including in Union Councils (UC) – the smallest administrative units in Bangladesh – which could enhance women’s participation in public life.

Some 67 percent of respondents to a survey conducted by UNICEF in 2010 felt that female members of the UCs should be given more representation and power to make decisions for their communities.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Shirin Aktar, a young girl who resisted child marriage, poses with her mother outside their home in northern Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
RANGPUR, Bangladesh, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

Shirin Aktar was just 13 years old when her parents decided it was time for her to get married.

The eldest girl in a poor, conservative family hailing from the Rangpur district in northern Bangladesh, Shirin had few opportunities open to her: with no formal education or job prospects, marrying her 31-year-old cousin seemed her best bet to avoid a life of abject poverty.

The soft-spoken girl told IPS her parents never consulted her about their decision. Her father lacked a steady job, and the family had no home to call their own. Accepting the proposal of a relatively well-off businessman seemed to them the obvious choice for their daughter.

Unbeknownst to her family, Shirin had other plans. Determined to fulfil her dream of studying and going to college, the girl enlisted the help of her fellow members of ‘Child Journalists’, a group of local boys and girls who “oppose social injustice and raise awareness on children’s rights,” she said.

Sitting in her home in the village of Arajemon, located some 370 km northwest of the capital Dhaka, Shirin, who just turned 18, confessed that she had seen one too many female friends and relatives suffer dearly as a result of early marriage, experiencing everything from domestic violence at the hands of in-laws, to heavy loads of housework.

Shirin knew she could not go down the same path.

But standing up to her parents was not easy – it required courage, and massive peer support.

Reza, leader of Child Journalists, told IPS that despite being cognisant of the “consequences of meddling in adults’ affairs, we felt Shirin’s parents were doing her an injustice – we had to resist.”

The resourceful youngsters approached village elders, religious leaders, influential academics and local business-owners who agreed to talk to Shirin’s parents.

Still, this near unanimous support among community members would not have gone far without a boost from the Kishori Abhijan, or the Adolescent Empowerment project, an initiative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Bangladesh that works to equip young girls with the tools they need to make their own life choices.

First piloted in 2001, the programme arose in response to the staggering number of child marriages in this South Asian country of 150 million people. Over half a decade later, the need for such a service is – sadly – greater than ever.

With roughly one-third of the population living on less than a dollar a day, it is small wonder that families turn to marriage as a means of social mobility and an escape from a life of gruelling labour: finding a husband for a daughter means one less mouth to feed and the possibility of financial supplements from the spouse.

Despite progress in girls’ school enrolment rates, a substantial decline in fertility rates and greater freedom for young women to demand their rights, many still find their lives constrained by the custom of child marriage: according to recent research, 68 percent of women aged 20–24 were married before reaching the legal minimum age of 18, while other studies indicate that a vast majority of these girls were actually married off before their 16^th birthday.

Government data suggests that over 50 percent of the estimated 13.7 million adolescent girls in Bangladesh will be mothers by the age of 19.

In rural Bangladesh, where poverty is even more widespread than it is in the cities, girls from poor families are considered eligible for marriage at the onset of puberty – meaning children as young as 13 and 14 years old often become wives.

Partly in an effort to bargain down dowry prices, partly to “protect” their children against sexual harassment, impoverished families seldom think twice before handing their girls off to husbands who are often much older.

Child rights activists say the practice is not only socially damaging but also hazardous to girls’ health: in a country where 80 percent of all births happen in the home without a skilled medical attendant present, young mothers and their children are vulnerable to complications during pregnancy and a range of associated conditions such as pneumonia and low birth weight.

Early child marriages no doubt contribute to the country’s high maternal mortality rate of 320 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 21 deaths per 100,000 live births in countries like the United States.

Now, a major push by locals together with international organisations seems to be bearing fruit.

Self-help groups known as ‘kishori clubs’ bring together about 30 peers every fortnight to discuss everything from reproductive health and nutrition to gender roles and violence against women.

Group leaders trained by UNICEF help facilitate the acquisition of life skills such as stitching, pottery making, or learning how to rear poultry, which improve young women’s chances of securing a livelihood.

Kishori clubs work with affiliated grassroots organisations like the Centre for Mass Education in Science (CMES), which operate in hundreds of sub-districts around the country and have proven invaluable in providing basic training in computer literacy and carpentry, among others.

The youth collectives also act as coordinating bodies for awareness campaigns that include spreading information about child marriage among their peers and throughout the broader community.

Shirin’s story is a testament to the power of these local groups: when her father first approached the local marriage registrar, he refused to register the union before first checking the girl’s birth certificate, signaling a turning point from the days when officials would not blink an eye at the sight of a teenaged bride.

But advocates are aware that education alone will not change the mindset that perpetuates this practice. In order to put a complete cap on child marriage, it will be necessary to change the economic circumstances of impoverished families.

Rose-Anne Papavero, UNICEF chief of child protection in Bangladesh, told IPS that the agency is working with the government to “provide conditional cash transfers (of 472 dollars per year) to poor families… if they agree not to marry off their (underage) daughters, not to use child labour, and not to practice corporal punishment.”

The positive impacts are evident: the 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) reported that there has been a slow but steady increase over the past 25 years in the average marriage age, from 14 years for women in their late 40s to 16.4 years for those in their early 20s.