Bangladesh
India
Pakistan
Sri Lanka
Bangladesh
CHEN, Martha, (1986) Quiet Revolution: women in transition in rural Bangladesh,
BRAC, Dhaka.
Martha Chen describes and evaluates the efforts of one agency in Bangladesh to reach
poor village women with projects designed to increase their material and social
resources. The book details the social and economic roles of these women and conveys
with immediacy the empirical base of the BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement
Committee) experience. The growth and development of BRAC's approach to
community development are described. The early approach was based on the
assumptions that a) the rural masses are passive and need to be conscientised; b) their
attitudes can be changed through education and training; c) the village communities,
although not homogenous, can be organised to work cooperatively. The lack of success
of the programmes prompted BRAC to conduct research analysis based on their
collective field experience. Their findings led to a transformation in their approach to
community development and to a radically new set of assumptions. It began to
understand that the village is not a unified community but a set of sub-groups with
conflicting interests. The rural power structure affects access to power and distribution
of resources. The most important policy change in the light of these new findings was
that in order to address the rural power structure, the capacities of and institutions for
the poor and powerless must be developed through collective socio-economic action.
The selection of poor and marginal women as the target group for a particular BRAC
project led to the realisation that education is an essential, but not the most crucial,
factor in improving the status of these women. Yet the critical importance of education
is acknowledged. The changes that the women experienced in their lives after joining
BRAC's program are described by the women in informal interviews with the author.
These include changes in relationships, in attitudes, in the resources they have access to
or control of and, most critically, in their access to and exercise of power. Chen
concludes by trying to identify the reason for the poor results of the development efforts
of the past two decades. The fact that women were overlooked and that women's work
was not valued may explain the relative lack of success of these efforts. The actual and
potential contribution of women to national development should be addressed in
development planning and practice.
This remarkable book describes a particular programme of an NGO that has now