Discussants at a session during Bangladesh Development Forum (BDF) laid emphasis on creating a strong database on violence against women and their empowerment to address the relevant issues for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) 5, 8 and 10.
Despite lots of achievement on women's development and economic empowerment in the country, their successes fade away for the inability to address the problems related to violence against women in absence of a strong database, they lamented.
The discussants were sharing views during the session titled 'Addressing Violence against Women and Ensuring Women Empowerment' of the two-day forum held at a city hotel, with State Minister for Women and Children Affairs Meher Afroze Chumki presiding.
Women and Children Affairs secretary Nasima Begum presented the keynote paper, on which UK High Commissioner Alison Blake, Regional Director of Asia Pacific Regional office of UN Women Miwa Kato and President of Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry Selima Ahmad spoke.
Representatives from different UN offices including UNICEF, UNFPA and WFP and development partners also addressed the session.
The discussants highlighted the issues of brining women in front of all stairs, ensuring justice in time, improving support at village level, ensuring decent work and addressing domestic violence when the country is graduating into a middle-income status.
The keynote speaker citing statistical data from BBS survey 2015 said 72.6 per cent married women faced violence by their husbands while 28.7 per cent reported emotional abuse and 27.2 per cent sexual abuse in their lifetime.
The secretary said the government has taken various programmes including gender responsive budget, increased allocation in the budget, safety net, skill development, entrepreneurship development and income generating activities, to ensure gender equality and empowerment for achieving SDG 5 and 7th Five Year Plan.
But she called upon the development partners to play role in meeting the country's challenges in preventing child marriage, improving institutional supports for women entrepreneurs, developing tools and techniques for unpaid care work and empowering local government institutions for women empowerment.
The UK High Commissioner praised the government for incorporating gender equality in its policy including 7th Five Year Plan but pointed out the challenges in preventing child marriage, greater participation of women in quality and higher jobs, better education etc to tackle the shocking level of violence against women.
She said female labour force participation is still low and they are found less in upper segment of job market, including in garment sector.
She also called for raising awareness about gender issues in all levels for curbing violence against women and improving overall environment for women's economic participation.
The UN Women regional director said though globalisation has brought millions of women into paid labour, it has also reproduced gender inequalities by concentrating women workers at the bottom of the global value chain, in the lowest paid jobs, in piece-rate, subcontract work and insecure forms of self-employment, with little or no access to social protection.
She also highlighted the women's contribution to the country's GDP growth but said the economic growth of the country is not necessarily translating into greater gender equality for all.
Ms Miwa Kato said women in Bangladesh face significant restriction of opportunities because of gender and cultural norms and the labour market remains highly segmented along gender-lines, with women concentrated in domestic services and home-based work.
The BWCCI president focused on justice in time and improving village level law enforcement agency services to reduce the level of violence. She said investing on women in economic participation including entrepreneurship development will increase the women contribution to the GDP and improve the government's revenue income.
Ambassador to Sweden Charlotta Schlyter and Deputy High Commissioner of Australia Sally Anne also spoke among others.
smunima@yahoo.com