Bangladesh - a global centre of excellence in micro finance, woman empowerment
VognoDuut804
Khan Ferdousour Rahman , On e-mail
Bangladesh is a global centre of excellence in micro finance and home
of many successful micro finance institutions. The idea of microcredit is
something for which Bangladesh can deservedly claim the intellectual
property right. Bangladesh has one of the largest numbers of microcredit
borrowers in the world. It has been accepted as an effective tool for
poverty alleviation and an approach to development. Access to credit has
been recognised as a human right. Microcredit is playing a very important
role in developing our socio-economic condition. It has been serving the
purpose of poor borrowers who cannot provide the collateral. Microcredit
provides the poor with little money to start with, which helps the poor to
take a leap forward out of the poverty cycle. The micro finance service has
been considered very effective and efficient with more than ninety-five
percent recovery.
From the time of initiation, MFIs have provided credit to the women
members. A study shows that more than eighty percent of current recipients
of microcredit are women. Now the question is why the MFIs include mostly
the women as their credit recipients.
The MFIs are acclaimed for their endeavours in empowering women. The
goal of the MFIs as development organisations is to serve the financial need
of un-served or underserved people as a means of meeting the development
objectives. The women are the most vulnerable class and comprise almost
fifty percent of the total population. The objective is to empower the women
by increasing their economic position in the society. Access to credit helps
women generate self-employment, which enhances their earnings.
Access to credit leads to empowerment of women, which includes
increased mobility, more decision-making power and greater control over
their lives. It enhances women's status that leads to improvement in women's
decision-making power in the family.
The MFIs consider the women as potential borrowers as the commercial
banks are unwilling to lend to women or mobilise deposits from them, as they
perceive that women are unable to control the household income. The women
face cultural barriers that often restrict them to home, making it difficult
for them to have access to financial services. The women have more
traditional role in economy and disproportionately large household
obligations. Their property right is limited, which is given importance for
collateral by commercial banks.
The women generally have a high sense of responsibility. They are good
savers as well as good re-payers of the loan and attend the meetings
regularly. Any increase in women's income benefits the household to a
greater extent, as they take better care of children. No matter who uses the
loan, it benefits the household.
It also facilitates the effective utilisation of the hidden economy of
women.
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> Bangladesh - a global centre of excellence in micro finance, woman empowerment
http://www.hrw.org/about/projects/womrep/General-150.htm
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT
BANGLADESHI WOMEN AND GIRLS TRAFFICKED TO PAKISTAN
Hidden in the slums of Karachi, Pakistan is a flourishing trade in
young women and girls from Bangladesh.106 The forced trafficking of
Bangladeshi women and girls into Pakistan for the purposes of domestic
or sexual slavery has been going on for at least ten to fifteen
years.107 A 1991 study by the National Council for Social Welfare in
Pakistan estimated that one hundred to 150 Bangladeshi women and girls
are brought into Pakistan each year and many are sold against their
will into prostitution, marriage or domestic servitude.108 The average
age of the trafficking victims is fifteen.109 The majority have been
lured from Bangladesh to Pakistan with promises of jobs, decent pay and
a better life. Others were abducted fromoutside their homes and then
sometimes drugged. The Bangladeshi women and girls are brought by bus
and train through India to Pakistan or, in many cases having been
transported to India, they walk across the border into Pakistan.110
They often end up in brothels in Bangladeshi paras (slums) in Karachi,
although as their numbers have grown, brothels have been found in small
towns throughout Pakistan.111
In the early days of the female slave trade in Pakistan, when the
number of victims was smaller and the crime less well-known, the sale
of women and girls was advertised blatantly. A Bangladeshi journalist
who witnessed an auction described it:
At night, girls were brought to the slum and [the] auction took place
indoors. There was not bidding as such because there was an
understanding between the procurers and the customers before the
auction. Usually the younger and more beautiful girls were sold quickly
and at higher prices. The unmarried and virgin girls were sold for
15,000 to 20,000 taka [U.S.$1 = 33.20 taka]. Some girls were kept aside
before the auction to be taken separately to hotels for wealthy buyers
who were given the opportunity to inspect the girls individually. Those
who were sold went with the buyers. The rest returned to the place they
came from. Everyone remained silent. It seemed that the girls were
helpless and speechless.112
In recent years, as the number of Bangladeshi women and girls
trafficked into Pakistan has increased and the problem has drawn
additionalpublic attention, the practice of selling females has become
more clandestine.113 By the early 1990s, agents acting on behalf of
pimps kept the women in dens within Karachi's teeming slums and quietly
traded them from these hostels.114
The Bangladeshi women and girls are held under terrible conditions.
According to a 1993 report, the women are not given proper food and are
kept in crowded rooms. They are given chores to do while they are in
the den, such as washing and cooking.115 To compel the women and girls
to provide the desired services, the pimps threaten to expose the
women's status as illegal immigrants or denounce them under the Hudood
laws, which penalize, among other things, sex outside of marriage and
impose long prison terms and severe corporal punishment.116 Those who
resist are beaten or worse.117
Rather than continue to auction the Bangladeshi women and girls openly,
as publicity about the abuses grew the pimps took to marrying them off,
sometimes to the pimps themselves. These forced marriages protect the
pimps from being charged under the Hudood laws. In an interview with a
local Karachi daily, an infamous pimp, Sher Khan, who denied selling
girls but was later arrested for running a brothel, claimed, "I assist
in the arrangements of a girl's marriage. It is a good deed. I collect
the money from the bridegroom's parents and pay it to the girl's
parents. The priest pronounces marriage and a simple ceremony takes
place."118
Bangladeshi women who were picked up during police raids of
prostitution dens, or who escaped, reported that they were "married"
rather than sold and that the exchange of money between the pimp and
the buyer took the form of dowry. A 1988 story in a Karachi newspaper
documented the sale of a Bangladeshi woman in which an Islamic judge
charged 500 rupees (US $19) to "marry" the girl to her buyer.
Reportedly, these "husbands" often bought the girls and then sold them
again at a small profit. Depending on the virginity, beauty and health
of the women and girls, a sale could bring anywhere from US$800 to
US$1,600.119
Instead of protecting the Bangladeshi women and girls by arresting
those accountable for their illegal sale and forced prostitution or
forced marriage, the Pakistani government has imprisoned the women and
girls while allowing most brokers and pimps to go free. According to
the 1990 National Welfare Survey by the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan, 1,400 Bangladeshi women and girls were imprisoned in
Pakistan, ostensibly for entering the country illegally or for offenses
under the Hudood Ordinances.120
In many cases Bangladeshi women and girls arrested by police in raids
on brothels suffered prolonged detention, usually because they lacked
legal counsel or the financial resources to pay bail or surety. In
other cases, the police allowed pimps to bail out the women and take
them back to the prostitution dens. Meanwhile, the pimps went free. At
the time of our investigation, some pimps involved in the sale of
Bangladeshi women and girls had been arrested by the police, not one
had been prosecuted or punished bythe government for trafficking or for
any of the other abuses resulting from trafficking and forced
prostitution. Speaking in 1991, one local activist noted that the
Pakistani government, instead of dealing with the problems, seemed
intent on "victimizing the victims."121
106 The following material was adapted from Asia Watch (now Human
Rights Watch/Asia) and Women's Rights Project, Double Jeopardy: Police
Abuse against Women in Pakistan (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992).
107 Daily Star (Dhaka), editorial, September 1, 1991.
108 "Promises of Decent Living Lure BD Women to Come to Pakistan," Dawn
(Karachi), November 2, 1991, p. 7.
109 Beena Sarwar, "Victimizing the Victims," Weekend Post (Lahore),
November 15, 1991.
110 Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid, The Flesh Trade: Report on
Women's and Children's Trafficking in Pakistan, (Karachi: Lawyers for
Human Rights and Legal Aid, 1991)[hereinafter The Flesh Trade 1991].
111 Macsoon Hussain, Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Pakistan
(unpublished report, 1991), p. 6. The author is a Pakistani sociologist
who has studied the problem of trafficking.
112 Muhammad Ali, "Trafficking in Women, part II," Weekly Detective
(Dhaka), October 21, 1983.
113 According to social worker Abdul Sattar Edhi, who runs the largest
refuge for Bangladeshi women in Pakistan, as of 1989 fifteen to twenty
women crossed the borders each month. By 1992 the monthly number had
risen to 150 to 200. According to The Flesh Trade 1991, over 200,000
Bangladeshi women and girls altogether were in Pakistan as a result of
trafficking.
114 The 1991 report by the Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid notes
that "the girls, women and children are brought to Karachi and are kept
in the dens of these touts [pimps] whose wives and daughters help them
in keeping a hawk's eye on these women. In the meantime, the pimps
arrange buyers for these girls." Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal
Aid, The Flesh Trade 1991, p. 7.
115 Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid, The Flesh Trade: Report on
Women's and Children's Trafficking in Pakistan (Karachi: Lawyers for
Human Rights and Legal Aid, 1993), p. 4 [hereinafter The Flesh Trade
1993].
116 The Hudood Ordinances criminalize, among other things, adultery,
fornication and rape, and prescribe punishments for these offenses that
include stoning to death, public flogging and amputation. The Hudood
laws, as written and applied, clearly conflict with principles of human
rights. Not only do they prescribe punishments that are cruel and
inhuman under international law, but they clearly discriminate on the
basis of gender. For a more complete discussion of the Hudood
Ordinances, see the Pakistan section in the chapter on "Abuses Against
Women in Custody" from this volume.
117 Bhagwandas, "Bengali Women: Paradise Lost?" Tuesday Review
(Karachi), January 29-February 4, 1991. Bhagwandas interviewed several
women who were detained after an August 1990 police raid on a brothel
in Karachi. One of the women told him, "All the women in the den were
forced to live in sin. None of them including me were spared. First the
den keeper's men used me and then later other men used to come." The
woman told the reporter that any women who resisted was badly beaten,
so that the women had to give in to the requests of the operators.
118 Zulqarnin Shadid and Bushra Jabbar Khan, "The Slave Trade," Mag
(Pakistan), August 1990, p. 57.
119 In 1988 the going rate was 30,000 to 50,000 rupees, and before that
the price was 5,000 to 10,000 rupees. Sarwar, "Victimizing the Victim,"
Weekend Post.
120 Dawn, November 2, 1991, p. 69.
121 Advocate Nausheen Ahmed, cited in Sarwar, "Victimizing the
Victims," Weekend Post.
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