Paula Kantor - AgWISE: A Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Perspective [11:18-16:18]

The incomes earned et cetera So we also wanted to assess how climate impacts on agriculture water systems are shaping you know women and men's water insecurity experiences And finally the thing that we wanted to assess is that when we talk about water challenges whether it's in relation to drinking domestic water or whether it's relation to you know agriculture systems often we only talk about the physical and material and technical dimensions of these issues So our sort of choice for working with Northwestern University and building on their Y scales was also because that is one of the few scales or perhaps the only one that focuses also on the psychosocial impacts of water insecurity experiences the next slide Okay, so why Bangladesh you know obviously most our car is there doing the field work but other than that you know Bangladesh is really interesting place in our view to sort of look into these issues First of all this work that was done on developing a methodology for mapping climate agriculture gender inequality hotspots by our CGI our gender colleagues you know identified that Bangladesh is definitely one of the countries which has a large number of these climate agriculture gender inequality hotspots Although this study does not you know have a water lens as well to it so that was also our contribution to this study And Bangladesh is interesting because this very recent analysis done by the World Bank and the production of this poverty and equity brief and identifies that you know Bangladesh which has been known for quite some time as South Asia sort of growing emerging economic growth You know country and very recording very robust economic growth as well as social progress since 2010 leading to declines of poverty and So it presents like on the one hand there in the recent past there's been very positive analyses of poverty decline in Bangladesh But a study by the World Food Program just before COVID hit in identified that food insecurity persists across Bangladesh and climate is really shaping these challenges but post COVID and also post all of these challenges that Bangladesh has recently encountered But I think I'm missing the presentation slide okay okay there I have it. I has identified that you know of the 36% of people who are still identified as vulnerable to poverty almost 1.2 million people have been at very high risk of falling back into poverty all of these reasons Also in a so there is growth on the one hand but a persisting poverty and persisting food insecurity in Bangladesh. The other contradiction is that the World Economic Forum's assessment of gender inequality or gender equality identifies Bangladesh as the most gender equal country in South Asia a position that Bangladesh has consistently held for a couple of years. However, other studies including by the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs in Bangladesh have identified that gender social norms are highly unequal in Bangladesh and contrary to progress recorded elsewhere there is a lot of resilient resilience to change you know at various levels which result in you know full benefits and empowerment not really being achieved by women held back because of these persisting unequal gender social norms and then finally the third point which is really relevant is that Bangladesh is obviously very vulnerable to climate change.