The 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

BIOGRAPHY of Tahrunnesa Ahmed Abdullah

TAHRUNNESA AHMED ABDULLAH was born on April 21, 1937 in the village of Ghoragachha, Jhenida subdivision of Jessore district, East Bengal, India (to become East Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971). Had she come from an average Bengali Muslim family she would have expected to remain illiterate, to be married soon after puberty and to have spent the rest of her life confined to her home, barring occasional excursions under the head-to-toe covering of a burkha (veil). Instead, her father, Rafiuddin Ahmed, a lawyer at the Dacca High Court and son of a prominent Bengali Muslim family, and her mother, Anwari Ahmed, followed his family's custom and gave their eight daughters as fine an education as, and some of the freedoms of, their five sons.

Educated in Calcutta, Rafiuddin Ahmed had begun practicing law in the Calcutta High Court and in 1950, after partition, had moved his family to Dacca, capital of the portion of Bengal that became East Pakistan. The Ahmeds, one reporter wrote of the greater family, was one "where dozens of educated women go to form a galaxy of achievers." TAHRUNNESA, the fourth child, suspects that her father, whom she describes as her friend and guide, "liked his daughters more than his sons." He gave preference to their education, she says, and "when we achieved something he was very proud of it."

Her first four years of primary school were taken at Shishu Bidda Pithh (1943 through 1946), followed by fifth through eighth grades at Sakhawat Memorial Girls High School, both in Calcutta. She next attended the Kamrunnesa Government Girls High School (1950-1953) in Dacca and received a Bachelor of Arts from Eden Girls' College, University of Dacca, in 1958. Encouraged to study social work by her eldest sister, Dr. Kamrunnesa Islam, she then attended the College of Social Welfare and Research Center (also affiliated with Dacca University and now a department called the Institute of Social Welfare and Research), receiving her Master of Arts in the school's first graduating class in 1960.

During her school years TAHRUNNESA had become keenly aware of the disparity between her liberal urban upbringing and the customs of rural society. Once or twice a year Ahmed would take his children back to their ancestral village to give them a sense of attachment to their roots. Once they went instead to their married aunt's village. For the first time TAHRUNNESA was forced to observe purdah (lit. modesty, broadly interpreted as seclusion of women). "You are a grown girl," her aunt told her. "You cannot go out; you must stay in the house." TAHRUNNESA watched enviously as her younger sisters went about as they pleased. Soon the family came to take them all back to their own village where, to TAHRUNNESA’s amazement, even her aunt visited her friends freely. "This is our village," her aunt explained, "we are daughters of this village, so we can go out." A married woman, TAHRUNNESA learned, is an outsider in her husband's village, and must remain secluded as long as she stays there; in the village of her birth she is freer. Few women marry in their own village.

TAHRUNNESA AHMED’s first position after graduation was as Executive Officer of the East Pakistan Council for Child Welfare in Dacca. During that year (1960-61) she organized the Crippled Children's Center which is still in operation, and wrote the first of the numerous articles she has published on social problems, "School Social Work and Its Scope in East Pakistan." From mid-1961 to 1963 she was District Health Education Officer for the Bureau of Health Education. In pursuit of this interest she attended, under a U.S. International Cooperation Administration (now Agency for International Development) grant, the American University in Beirut, receiving a Diploma, with Distinction, in Public Health in 1962.

In 1963 AHMED joined the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development in Comilla as Instructor in charge of the recently instituted Women's Program and in that capacity headed the Academy's Women's Education and Home Development Program. Years later a reporter was to remark with amazement that AHMED, "an urban woman, took rather early work in a field not popularly known or understood in these areas until recently—working with rural projects." The Comilla Academy had been established by the government of Pakistan in 1959 to train government and quasi-government personnel concerned with all levels of rural development. Academy Director Akhter Hameed Khan—who received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1963 "for inspiring personal commitment to developing a viable pattern for rural reform in East Pakistan"—introduced into the area a system of village cooperatives. These societies were established and maintained on the principle of encouraging villagers to take the initiative rather than telling them what to do. Once organized, the villagers had access to guidance, assistance and training from the Central Cooperative Association and the Thana (subdistrict) Training and Development Center. Until the institution of the Women's Program, however, all rural development schemes were geared to men.

The Women's Education and Home Development Program was begun at Comilla Academy in 1962. The idea was first discussed at the Cooperative Association and with managers and model farmers at the Thana Center. Some approved of a women's program, others disapproved in whole or in part. Those who agreed with the concept discussed it in their villages and women from the first six villages to approve the idea were invited to visit the center to see what the men were learning. They were then invited back to participate in a strictly women's project whose goal was to raise the status of women—in the family and society—by increasing their economic status; it has been observed that women who control money had more acceptance in family, and indirectly village, councils. In rural Bengal as elsewhere, "money talks."

During her nine years at Comilla AHMED was responsible for the organization of village level training programs for women that included adult literacy; health education, sanitation and nutrition; agricultural extension; creation of cooperatives to promote cottage crafts and other income generating activities. She also developed training courses for government officials on women's problems and health needs in rural East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and coordinated the overall Comilla Academy training program. For two years she was also in charge of the publication section and for one year served as vice chairman of the Comilla Khadi Association. (Khadi is a handloomed cloth popularized by Mahatma Gandhi to fight against mill cloth imported from Britain, and the Khadi Association was one of the organizations established by Gandhi to promote its production and use.)

A major task of the Comilla Women's Program, as AHMED wrote in her pioneering report which was published in Bengali in 1966 and later in English under the title Village Women As I Saw Them, was to gather information about "the customs and restrictions which direct and control the daily life of women, and in some cases, stand in the way of the development of their talents." Dr. Sondra Zeidenstein, (American adviser from 1974 to 1976 to the Integrated Rural Development Program, Women's Program by appointment of the Bangladesh Government under World Bank financing), in her Foreword to the 1974 English translation of this work, points out that it is "one of the few studies about rural women of Bangladesh" and "the only study by a Bengali woman." She notes that although the author calls the information contained therein "quite ordinary," it is "the kind of information that even educated people who live in village areas don't always know at a conscious or operational level until it is pointed out to them. And it is the kind of information that is of great value in determining how programs that involve rural women can best be set up."

In her village research AHMED reconfirmed what she had learned about purdah restrictions in her aunt's village. To her surprise, however, she found that purdah is regarded as a status symbol and is more strictly followed in houses of higher socioeconomic status. Only poor families who cannot afford to keep their women in the home do not observe the custom. The study indicated, moreover, that when poor women earn money, they increase the purdah restrictions of their daughters. And the burkha, AHMED found, far from being considered a liability, conferred upon women the status of purdah at the same time that it allowed them freedom to leave their homes.

Since purdah is the visible expression of woman's dependency upon male support for survival and for status, the first step of the Women's Program was to make the participation of women in activities outside the home socially acceptable to the men of the village, and thus to the women whose status depended upon male approval.

Already attitudes were changing, AHMED discovered in this first survey. In the 20 villages studied—all of which were participants in the Comilla Academy Women's Program—72 percent of the young girls were attending primary school, a figure far above the national average. The attitude seemed to be that girls should go to school until they were of marriageable age (about 12) since they had no specific duties in the household. This was a change from earlier years when people thought that educated girls would be less affectionate and obedient than the uneducated. By 1966 families, in particular those with some connection to a sown, felt that educated boys might want to marry educated girls, that education would enable women to understand and practice their religion better, and that if necessary girls with some education could get jobs in town. The study also noted that village adult education, sponsored by the cooperatives, gave young girls who lived too far from schools a chance to learn.

The year after publishing this report TAHRUNNESA went to the United States to study at Michigan State University, from which she received a Master of Science in Agriculture Extension Education in 1968. Her thesis was entitled, The Place of Evaluation in Comilla Women's Program. This graduate year was underwritten by the Ford Foundation.

In 1970 TAHRUNNESA AHMED became the bride of Siraj Kabir Mohammad Abdullah, whose family was from Comilla and had long been associated with the cooperative movement. It was an arranged marriage as custom prescribed. Though she first met Siraj at their wedding ceremony, he had been well described to her by his sister who was her colleague at the Comilla Academy. TAHRUNNESA ABDULLAH credits her husband with much of her success. "He has been my friend, philosopher and guide," she says, and "has been very patient with me." Siraj Abdullah is today a senior geologist in the Geological Survey of Bangladesh.

The state of Bangladesh came into being in December 1971 as a result of a bloody war for independence from Pakistan. During this Liberation War, as Bangladeshis refer to it, the ABDULLAHS took into their small two-bedroom home the wife and two young sons of Major Zia Ur Rahman, now president of Bangladesh, but then a member of the Mukti Bahini (freedom fighters). They did this in June at the request of a friend because Mrs. Zia had no friends or relatives who were not under surveillance. Their "guests" were discovered after one month by the Pakistani army and placed under house arrest elsewhere; Siraj was taken to jail. Not knowing where her husband was taken or when he would be allowed to return, TAHRUNNESA left their home the same night and went to her second sister in Dacca, with whom she stayed for, three months until her husband was released. At the urging of another sister who was a gynecologist, the ABDULLAHS took two rooms she prepared for them in her clinic. There, scant weeks before the end of the war, TAHRUNNESA gave birth to their son, Matin Saad. When they later returned to their own house the ABDULLAHS were cheered to find that it had not been looted.

The war left innumerable women bereft of the support of fathers, brothers or husbands. Many suddenly found that they had to support themselves and their families in a society where they had been expected to remain in seclusion and where all development efforts and income producing projects had been directed toward men.

Within this context of crisis ABDULLAH's excellent experience a Comilla Academy brought her to the forefront of the rehabilitation of fort. In 1972 she became the Director (Training) of the National Board of the Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation and Welfare Foundation. During her two years in this capacity she established the Women' Career Training Institute, the first institution in Bangladesh wholly devoted to career training for women. Intended for women war victims it became the training model for the National Board. As director ABDULLAH was involved in the planning, organization and execution of all training, production and marketing programs of the institute, and exercised administrative and financial supervision, as well.

Since 1974 ABDULLAH has served, under a series of Directors General, as Joint Director in charge of the Women's Program, of Bangladesh's Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP). Her job has been to develop a national plan for integrating rural women into the nation's economic and social development process. She is well aware that unless women are regarded as an integral, functional part of society, their development, and the development of the nation, will be hampered. Since the beginning she has administered and supervised the program and has been responsible for staff training.

ABDULLAH recognizes the importance of research and evaluation to good programing, but she points out that Bangladesh's problems are too critical to wait until research is done first. She feels, moreover, that "the time that elapses from the initial research design to final policy making and program evaluation is so long that the nature of the problem may have changed sufficiently to invalidate the research findings." A program, she insists, is a process: "research and evaluation are critical parts of, not separate from, the program itself." As she and Zeidenstein wrote in 1976, "because of the prevalence of misinformation about rural women on the one hand, and the lack of accurate data on the other hand, plus difficulties of collecting information, the project itself has had to be a way of finding out what is workable for rural women that is consistent with national development goals."

The IRDP was established in 1971 as a national extension of the Comilla Academy model—with important modifications. It organized the villagers into credit and service cooperatives to give them access to government services and to increase their productive abilities. The Women's Program, which was instituted in 1974, received initial funds under the population planning project of the World Bank which saw "direct involvement of women in development as a way to bring down the birth rate." With 83 million people in 1976, the year after the program officially started, Bangladesh was the world's eighth most populous nation. It was exceeded in density only by Singapore and Hong Kong, and had a population growth rate of 2.6 percent annually.

Nor does the country have the resources to support such a dense population; per capita income in 1976 was estimated at only US$100 a year. Rafael Salas, Executive Director of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, has emphasized that "no appreciable solution to the unemployment problem can come about if planners do not ensure that the population factor becomes a vital component in the overall development programs."

Due to profound poverty, life expectancy in Bangladesh in 1970s was estimated at 46 years, and the functional literacy rate was less than 25 percent nationwide—only 5 percent for women. Adrienne Germain, in a report for the Ford Foundation, noted that "over 90 percent of Bengali females live in rural areas and bear the brunt poverty even more than males." In 1974 the median marriage for women was 13.3 years and maternal mortality was "very high. " The school dropout rate for girls was earlier and higher than for boys, a factor which reduced their opportunity to learn ways and skills improve their lives.

The hypothesis of the Women's Program was that women would have more control over their reproductive lives if they had some economic autonomy. The program set up pilot projects in one thana (a thana is the lowest governmental administrative unit, a subdistrict normally incorporating about 100 square miles of land and 200,000 persons living in from 150 to 400 villages) in each of the 19 districts the country. In each thana it established 10 village-based women's cooperatives. The initial project, begun officially in July 1975, was to last three and a half years; it had a budget of 16,700,000 taka (US$ 1,670,000 from the International Development Association (the World Bank agency handling soft loans and headquartered in Washington, D.C., U.S. including US$760,000 in foreign exchange, plus US$45,000 allotted the Ford Foundation. By 1978 women's cooperatives were operating in 500 villages, with a total membership of 18,000; 15 women needed to organize a cooperative and the average one today has members. Over the next three years the program hopes to add a thousand more villages to its roster.

The Women's Program is divided into two major activities—cooperatives and population planning—both of which are supported and coordinated by ABDULLAH and her staff, under the guidance of the IRI director general. In each thana the program is represented by a staff consisting of one deputy project officer and two women inspector who organize and supervise the women's cooperatives and population planning activities in their thana. One male inspector works on male side of the population planning program.

From the beginning ABDULLAH and her colleagues "found misinformation about rural women to be extraordinarily pervasive and persistent." ABDULLAH’s own early studies of village women had only revealed the tip of the iceberg; the most fundamental area of misinformation concerned the daily activities of the women. Previous researchers who had questioned male villagers about women had been told they work at "nothing" and know "nothing." Rural women were consequently perceived by all levels of society as ignorant, superstitious and without much work except cooking, cleaning and childbearing. Since the urban elite responsible for economic planning was given to understand that women did no agricultural work—and certainly they appear in the fields only under conditions of the most desperate poverty—women were consistently omitted from planning objectives.

Unfortunately, the information was untrue. ABDULLAH’s workers quickly learned that women are consistently responsible for a significant portion of the family's agricultural endeavor. They are in charge of seed preservation and storage, post-harvest rice-processing and grain storage; vegetable and fruit growing; poultry raising and livestock care; food processing and food preservation; manufacturing of household items such as bedding; house maintenance and repairs, and fuel gathering. In short, as an external study in 1975 revealed, rural women in Bangladesh spend more time than men in productive work when the definition includes child raising and food preparation. As Zeidenstein points out, "since 73 percent of the consumption of rural people is food and 14 percent is housing, it should be obvious how integrated women's economic role is."

Popular myths held that women could not manage economic affairs; that if they earned money they would cause conflict and the breakup of the family, or at the least would squander earnings on frivolous things. The experience of ABDULLAH’s field staff suggests just the opposite—women spend for their family's survival. And because they have so little money and so much work they are excellent managers of both money and time. Other contradictions emerged. Although men told questioners that women "don't work," they also insisted that women had no leisure time to take on economic projects. They added that women fight with each other, they won't travel and they won't change. Faced with contradictory experiences ABDULLAH and Zeidenstein could only speculate that these were the expressions of fear that women would gain power, or of an abstract ideal—that women should not work.

Proceeding from these broad findings ABDULIAH and Zeidenstein began to define the areas where information about women was totally lacking: areas in which women cooperate with each other; details of the work in which they engage; health, nutrition and family planning practices they already follow; their relations with the world outside the household; the extent to which they engage in business; and their spheres of influence vis-à-vis men. They realized that without this basic information no program to improve the lives of women could be effective.

Obstacles to acquiring these data, ABDULLAH found, were numerous. Researchers had to cope first with sex segregation. A male researcher could only get information from men—who had not proven to be reliable sources on women's matters. Women researchers, on the other hand, were themselves under purdah restrictions; they could not, for instance, stay in a strange village overnight, and they encountered a certain reticence by women to answer questions posed by strangers or asked in the presence of other people. ABDULLAH’s staff members enjoyed one advantage in this respect: they soon ceased to be strangers since they worked daily with the women through the cooperatives

However the field staff suffered from other handicaps. At the beginning of the project, when information was most needed, the new staff members had little time for research; they were struggling to acquire administrative skills and to implement project plans. For the most part they were very young and the quality of their education was not high. More important, they had yet to acquire objectivity, i.e., to describe and analyze rather than judge; too often they responded to situations in terms of cultural stereotypes. Training programs for field staff constantly try to change such attitudes, but, as ABDULLAH wrote, "we must be careful not to underestimate what effort is involved in learning to become objective about one's [own] culture."

Gradually the staff refined the wording of their questionnaires to best elicit responses. By 1976 three surveys had been conducted; on the reproductive experiences of rural women, on basic agricultural knowledge and on earning and saving practices.

However making policymakers, planners and aid agencies understand the realities of women's functions in rural society has been a continuous uphill battle. In the IRDP Women's Program's Third Report in 1977, Dr. Florence E. McCarthy (U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer at Comilla Academy 1961-63 and World Bank adviser to the IRDP Women's Program 1966-67), noted that "women's programs have been considered secondary to the pressing need of programs for national economic, social and political development," largely because of the assumption that women's roles are "nonessential, secondary or separate." Planners have not realized the "necessity and interdependent integrated nature of the roles that rural women play in agricultural production." In the case of rice production, aid is given to men's visible work in the fields in the form of fertilizer, pesticides and improved irrigation facilities, but little is given to improve methods which are women's tasks. Ironically, when attention is given projects that are traditionally women's work—e.g. rice processing or storage—"tremendous amounts of money and time" are spent in an effort to make men "experts" in these areas. The result is either failure, because men refuse to accept women's work or do it badly, or success and the removal of that activity from the economic sphere of women, thus further weakening their already fragile economic viability. For the most part aid to women has been in terms of their child-bearing function, e.g, health and nutrition.

The IRDP Women's Program, on the other hand, seeks to incorporate women in the development process. It acts on the premise that a subsistence level activity by women can be raised to a commercial activity if a surplus is produced. The cooperatives, which are individual self-help societies rather than communal efforts, therefore provide credit facilities to help women start projects in which they already have expertise—for example, raising poultry, goats or cows—or provide them with improved varieties of seeds or fruit stock.

The credit extended is small, varying between US$15 and US$25, and lent for a period of six months. The women exhibit excellent managerial abilities and are very punctual and regular in repaying their loans. One woman, for example, the wife of a poor laborer and mother of eight, received a loan for Tk300 (about US$l25) to buy a calf. She repaid her loan punctually and took out a second loan which enabled her to buy another. These calves are now milk cows, providing enough milk for her children and a surplus to sell in the market. The cows are also used by her husband to plow a small plot of land which he could not otherwise have cultivated. Her assets have increased tenfold.

The cooperatives have been criticized by some for developing individual economic projects rather than collective ones, but ABDULLAH feels the latter will come as women learn to cooperate and seek to expand their activities. In one village the need has already been recognized. Five or six women who are making popped rice have asked for help in developing better packaging facilities and for assistance in reaching wider markets; both entail joint effort.

Meanwhile women's cooperatives serve as a first step to economic integration. Once women acquire skills and experience they will, as McCarthy writes, "be able to hold their own in joint cooperative societies with men and be more able partners in the development process." But first they have to learn through their segregated societies to be more vocal, more articulate and gain a better grasp of their problems.

Recently ABDULLAH has noticed some success with women becoming more vocal at the union level (a union is a government administrative unit comprising 10-15 villages). There are two positions in each (union council reserved for women who are appointed by the senior 'administrative officer of the thana. During the last union council election several women who were cooperative members were elected; unlike women council members from outside the cooperatives who "keep quiet, wear their best saris and sit in one comer," the women from the cooperatives had no compunction about standing up to the male council members, some of whom tried to tell them they were not full members because they did not have to spend a lot of money to get elected. According to ABDULLAH the women retorted: "You had to spend lots of money because you were not the right people for the job. We were the right people so we got chosen!"

IRDP's structure—within which the societies have constant communication with the Thana Central Cooperative Association and the Thana Training and Development Center—is a channel by which people can reach the government, and government thana-level services can be made available to the people. The government has assigned officers to thana headquarters who are experts in agriculture, fisheries, animal husbandry, family planning and health administration. These officers, however, with their one or two-member staffs, are responsible for reaching 300 to 400 villages, a task which in the past proved overwhelming. Today the IRDP is bringing the villagers to them. Once a week each village sends its leaders to the Thana Training Center to learn of any new developments. Thus, if new varieties of potato seeds have come in, or fertilizer or credit for the season is available, the information is transmitted through the leaders back to the villages.

The Women's Program follows the same pattern as the men's. Each week five members of the women's cooperative from each village travel to the Training Center. The men usually move alone, but the women feel more secure from opposition—either within their own village or on the road—if they travel in larger groups. Moreover, as ABDULLAH points out, most of the women are illiterate so they must remember all they learn to carry back to the village. With five delegates, if one forgets a detail another is likely to recall it. And, ABDULLAH concludes, five people carry much more weight in a village meeting than one.

The women are selected by the village cooperative, not by the field staff, and are usually those whom ABDULLAH calls "the marginal women"—widows, women with no children, or older women whose daughters or grandchildren can take care of family affairs for the day. In other words, trainees are those who do not have many responsibilities, who have some freedom to move about, but who nonetheless command a certain respect in the village. Attendance at the weekly meetings is almost 100 percent since this is the only chance these women have to travel outside, with the sanction of the village. Attendance is not even stopped by the fact that the travel allowance given by the IRDP is usually insufficient and most women have to walk from 1 to 20 miles to the thana center. They often save what little travel pay they receive to buy food or poultry, or for house repairs or their children's education.

Although the Women's Program concentrated first on economic projects—both because of the extreme poverty in the villages and because it was felt that women able to contribute to the family income would have more say in family matters—the societies have become the centers of broader activities. The IRDP has begun to work with other vouluntary agencies to improve the quality of life of women. With the assistance of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee it has introduced functional literacy classes, and mobile teams from a joint program of the Dacca University Nutrition Institute and UNICEF regularly visit the cooperatives with advice on nutrition and assist with training and evaluation. Recently the program has begun to send girls from the cooperatives for training at Gonoshasthaya Kendra, the rural health project of Dr. Zafarullah Choudhury. These girls are taught to take care of most of the primary health needs of the villages. Still other girls are sent for training in duck raising projects sponsored by International Voluntary Services, a private international agency based in Washington, D.C. which undertakes rural development projects. Planners and policy makers had insisted that women would not be willing to travel the 300-400 miles necessary to receive such training, but, ABDULLAH points out proudly, "the women proved them wrong"; they may travel with relatives or with their children, but they are regular and punctual.

The health program has just begun. It calls for one month of training, to be followed by five months of village practice and evaluation; another month of training will be given based on observed need. One hundred and twenty villages are involved in the initial indoctrination which includes treatment for intestinal and simple skin diseases and fever, and techniques of inoculation and vaccination.

Although the Women's Program field staffs have conducted research and evaluation activities as an integral part of their programs, they have found to their dismay that foreign aid agencies often do not accept the results and insist on duplicating the research, or even the projects, themselves. In a 1977 paper jointly authored by ABDULLAH, McCarthy and Zeidenstein the authors gave as an example that Comilla had established a program to train village doctors. Now an agency is coming in to start a similar program, "yet no assessment of the Comilla village doctors training has been done and so the new program stands a good chance of making the same mistakes, and not learning from the experiences of the past programs." The authors also pointed out that "there is an almost universal tendency among agency people, planners and policy makers to grossly underestimate the intelligence, openness and willingness of rural people to change their conditions." For example, they "still assume that village people are against family planning" and that therefore top priority must be given to motivating them to accept the concept. However acceptance is no longer the problem; village people accept birth control in principle, especially the women, but in practice many have been put off by experiencing or witnessing bad side effects of some contraceptives. A basic problem is that family planning workers have administered contraceptives without knowing their acceptors, and health facilities are inadequate to follow through on physical difficulties that may result: at the primary health care level there is simply "no dear knowledge about how each contraceptive works." Contraceptive pills, for example, have not been tested on the undernourished. If a woman gets sick from taking them, she cannot work and will therefore give them up. Therefore agencies wishing to assist birth control programs should concentrate their efforts, ABDULLAH says, not so much on gaining new acceptors, as in improving the primary health infrastructure.

ABDULLAH and her co-authors also chide Western aid agencies for applying their own misconceptions and sexist attitudes about women to the Bengali situation. These misconceptions unfortunately dictate the materials foreign agencies provide. For example, they are wont to donate materials for sewing and knitting, when in Bangladesh it is the men who are the tailors. Conversely, "whenever some aspect of the productive labor that rural women do is seen as profitable, it becomes the basis for a new men's program, and is taken away from women." Women are assigned programs that can be done in the home—spinning, sericulture or bookkeeping—all of which reinforce the present status quo of women in the villages. Rural conditions, especially since the war for independence, however, have changed drastically, women are desperate for work, and this approach is an inadequate answer to present problems.

ABDULLAH and her colleagues find they have difficulty getting funds for women's experimental programs. "Millions can be spent on men's programs," they write, "and losses are written off as experiments, costs of development, or problems to be solved. Where women are concerned, however, any amount of money spent on them is considered as being virtually misspent. (This same assessment occurs regarding money spent on the rural areas rather than in urban areas.)"

Since foreign aid is based on evaluation of cost-benefit ratios ABDULLAH, McCarthy and Zeidenstein suggest that such evaluation be made from a position of sympathy and understanding, giving weight to such problems as training rural staffs, and credence to ongoing internal research and evaluation. "Program workers should not, by definition, be assumed to be biased, subjective and only interested in covering up problems," they write. They also call for a change from the patronizing attitude of policymakers, planners, and foreign aid agencies with regard to the rural poor in general: "The initiative and intelligence of rural people should be expected, accepted and more fully utilized. In the same way, greater recognition should be given to local people and program workers for their experience and knowledge about rural Bangladesh." Also agencies need to set more realistic targets; they err in thinking that because the countryside is undeveloped, it is uncomplicated; they look at programs from a very narrow point of view, rather than in the broad social context.

Since the Women's Program is part of the Bangladesh population project, ABDULLAH has become a respected voice on the international level on both advancement of women and population planning. In 1975 she attended the Population Planning Communications seminar at the East-West Center, Honolulu; the World Congress for International Women's Year in Berlin, and the International Seminar on Population Communication sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The United Nations also invited her in 1976 to be a delegate to the Economic and Social Council of Asia and the Pacific committee meeting on population in Bangkok, and to a U.N. Expert Group Meeting in New York on the "Establishment of an International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women." In 1977 she was invited by the director general of FAO to attend a meeting of experts on "Integration of Rural Women in Development" in Rome, and the following year she attended a consultancy meeting of the U.N. International Labor Organization in Geneva on "Women and Rural Development." That same year she also attended the seminar on Action Research on Women in Rural Development at the University of Sussex, England. For the last three years she has worked as short term consultant to the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Fund for Population Activities in Lanka, helping the Sri Lanka Mahila Samiti (women's institutes introduced by Dr. Mary H. Rutnam, 1958 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Public Service for "her gift of service to the Ceylonese people and example she has set by her full life of dedication as a private citizen the needs of others") develop a production-oriented women's program similar to the one she has developed in Bangladesh.

Throughout the years ABDULLAH has written more than 15 papers and articles on her work, and co-authored one book, Village Women of Bangladesh—Prospect for Change, written with Sondra Zeidenstein a due to be published shortly.

One observer has remarked that ABDULLAH is unusual, not only overcoming her society's traditional suspicion of women who "presume to provide community leadership," but in winning the respect of the male segment of that society. He noted that "she not only is a charismatic person, some of that charisma rubs off on her village staff." A final accolade he adds that in Bangladesh TAHRUNNESA AHMED ABDULLAH "virtually is unique among both male and female sexes in her community dedication."

September 1978
Manila

REFERENCES:

Abdullah, Tahrunnesa A. Village Women as I Saw Them. Dacca: Ford Foundation. May 1974. (Mimeographed.)

______. "Women’s Programs in Bangladesh and their Impact on Development." Presentation to Group Discussion. Transcript. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. Manila. September 2, 1978. (Typewritten.)

Abdullah, Tahrunnesa A., Florence E. McCarthy and Sondra A. Zeidenstein "Programme Assessment and the Development of Women’s Programme: The Views of the Action Worker. South and Southeast Asian Seminars on Women and Development. Dacca. March 1977 (Mimeographed.)

Abdullah, Tahrunnesa A. and Sondra A. Zeldenstein. Finding Ways to Learn about Rural Women: Experiences from a Pilot Project in Bangladesh. Dacca: Ford Foundation. November 1976.

"Bangladesh Aid Benefits Only Wealthy," Japan Times. June 21, 1977.

Gerard, Renee. Excerpts from A Feasibility Survey of Productive/Income Generating Activity for Women in Bangladesh. Dacca: Women's Development Program of UNICEF Dacca. October 1977.

Germain, Adrienne. Women's Roles in Banglades Development: A Program Assessment Dacca: Ford Foundation. 1976. (Mimeographed.)

Jara, Manolo B. "Legislators Shift Attention to 'Population Explosion,' " Times Journal. Manila. June 14,1979, p. 4.

McCarthy, Florence. IRDP’s Pilot Project in Population Planning and Rural Women's Cooperatives, 3rd Report. Dacca: Integrated Rural Development

Programme. 1977.

"Personality of the Week, Tahrunnesa Abdullah," Bangladesh Observer. September 10, 1978.

Zeidenstein, Sondra A. "A Bangladesh Project for Rural Women." A talk delivered at a Population Council Seminar, New York City, June 1977.

Interviews with and letters from persons acquainted with Tahrunnesa Ahmed Abdullah and her work.