The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

National and international experts at a roundtable in the city said the aims for implementation of women empowerment in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) are very weak.

They urged the Caretaker Government (CG) to make it more gender-friendly and sustainable for strengthening the PRSP to overcome poverty eradication in the country.

The roundtable on 'Sharing Review Findings of the Three Stand alone Issues in NSAPR' organised by Gender and PRSP Group (GPG) at CIRDAP Auditorium yesterday.

The speakers urged the CG to ensure equal participation of women in national and local levels decision-making activities.

They also urged the CG to ensure the national Human Rights Commission to promote the women's rights, strengthening women's representation in all public sectors and recruit women in government's high position through lateral entry. Despite having high utilisation of fund, urban-based women development project received lower allocation, said the speakers. Discontinuity of projects such as 'capacity building, poverty alleviation and sustainable livelihood of the socially disadvantaged women and their children' capacity building for gender mainstreaming and others raise doubts about the government's commitment to devote resources to women's empowerment, they said.

There is still little awareness among women about the availability of legal aid fund, budgetary allocation for social protection and safety net gross insufficient, the effectiveness of the violence prevention cell at Ministry of Women and Children Affairs cannot be addressed due to the lack of up to date statistics and the training projects of police and medical personnel on VAW are few and ill performing, they added.

There is a lack of institutional structures like independent human rights commission and ombudsperson. In the absence of independent and high-powered monitoring institutions it is difficult to implement the agenda related to women's rights and development, said the keynote presenter.

There is also a lack of coordination between different agencies responsible for implementation of the policy agenda, she also said.

The most critical problem in the PRSP is the lack of information and data. Many ambitious promises are made in the policy documents but the data to monitor real progress of these promises are scare and often they are not available for public security, said the speakers.

Sultana Kamal, former adviser to the CG, Jafar Ahmed Chowfdhury, Secretary of the Ministry of Planning, MA Hye Howlader, Secretary for Ministry of Social Welfare, Fritz Meijndert and Head of Development Cooperation of the Netherlands Embassy, Ranjan Karmaker, Team Leader of GPG Project, spoke, while Lailun Nahar Ekram, Member of Project Management Team of GPG Group, chaired.

Dr Dalem Chandra Barman, Professor of Department of Peace and Conflict Studies of Dhaka University and Nurul Kabir, Editor of New Age, spoke as panel discussants, while Dr Rita Afsar, Senior Research Fellow of Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), presented the keynote paper.