Rural women make fortune thru\\\' alleviating poverty

RANGPUR, July 9 (BSS): Thousands of the rural women have become their own fortune makers through various income- generating activities, small-scale businesses and enterprises in the northern districts.
Many of them have changed their fate with their own initiatives, capacities and potentials through properly utilising local resources setting up glaring example and saying good-bye to their abject poverty permanently.
The successful rural women, including landless and distressed, divorcees and widows, young girls and housewives of dozens of villages, are now confident about their future following their empowerment and achieved socioeconomic success.
Head of Programme Coordination of RDRS Bangladesh Monjusree Saha said the rural women have achieved the success through sewing handloom readymade garments, animal husbandry, poultry, homestead gardening, farming fruits and vegetables.
Social expert and NGO executive Akhterun Nahar Saki said rural women have changed fortune through setting up smaller cottage industries and enterprises, social forestation, micro-credit activities, VGD and other government programmes.
District Relief and Rehabilitation Officer of Rangpur Abdus Salam of Rangpur said many distressed rural women have achieved self-reliance from government's social safety net programmes that created huge income-generating opportunities and jobs.
Executive Director of Rangpur-based Northbengal Institute of Development Studies Dr Syed Samsuzzaman said many rural women lived under miseries due to poverty and their children could not go to the primary schools for education even a decade ago.
"But now, many rural women are engaged in cottage industries and set up enterprises and businesses for building a hunger-free middle income Bangladesh after achieving self-reliance and saying good-bye to abject poverty forever," he said.
Talking to the news agency, a number of the successful women of different areas said it became possible only after attaining self- reliance through their hard endevours and there is no incident of starving anywhere in their villages now.