Paula Kantor - AgWISE: A Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Perspective [16:18-21:32]

In several years it has remained as the seventh most vulnerable country to climate change and this recent study by World Bank identified that nearly one in three persons in Bangladesh living either in the open or the rule context based on climate risks. So for all of these reasons you know Bangladesh was obviously a very interesting place to look at what insecurity and angry food systems the next slide please. So in the last couple of years supported by the Asian mega deltas initiative initially and the scaling for impact science program later on we've been doing a couple of studies to really look at how water systems are changing in the coastal southern coastal areas the sort of delta flood plains of Bangladesh. Now what's very interesting we have these publications that we have one is in the dialogue online magazine and the other is a published paper. What's interesting is that 92% of Bangladesh's agriculture community are small holders and climate you know really makes the future quite insecure of this group significantly large number are landless and depending on agriculture labor in a fishing livestock and other livelihoods because of these reasons because these livelihoods are unreliable unpredictable and not really sustaining household food security as well as income there is a large you know there's evidence of significant mail out migration also female out migration in Bangladesh. Which is leading to situations where women increasingly taking take on agriculture labor work in addition to their domestic care work. However, this labor is largely unpaid also invisible and uncompensated for unaccounted for in in the policy and also other domains and despite the fact that women are increasingly are increasingly responsible for agriculture systems crop production you know disparities in land ownership persists there's unequal access to inputs credit markets institutions all of these shaped by a very masculine institutional context social context and resilience to change in these sort of settings of masculinity. I don't want to go into the details of you know how the waterscapes in the southern coastal deltas are changing this is something that we've written in the paper that that is also showing up on the slide but due to various infrastructure and policy changes the southern coastal deltas which were the flood plains the tributaries or Bangladesh's numerous rivers running into the sea you know there is very high salinity in these areas and in fact this area is often referred to as a desert in the deltas and especially in the dry seasons there is acute fresh water scarcity. So fresh water as a resource is very much contested and the struggles over fresh water unequal shaped by power patriarchy and social economic sort of disparities and there is significant food and nutrition in security in these contexts so. So you know these were all the reasons which also make the studying the analyses of the gender dynamics of agriculture water insecurity very interesting the next slide. So we work together with North Western University and build upon their wise skills and this is where I hand over the presentation to more over to you. So thank you Dr. Thipa, you can hear me right here. So I hear about the wise skills so there are actually four types of water and security experience skills which is developed by North Western University.