The 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership

CITATION for Tahrunnesa Ahmed Abdullah

Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
Manila, Philippines

Women in Bangladesh have benefited little from the modernizing influences that during the past three decades have changed the lives of millions of Muslim women elsewhere. Instead, during this same period the veiling, ankle-length burkha has become increasingly a mark of status among village women in Bangladesh.

This cumbersome, cloth-shielding of women symbolizes their restricted role and denial of opportunities in the society. In the villages, where about 90 percent of Bangladesh's more than 80 million people live in one of the world's most densely populated lands, women are segregated from work in the rice fields and markets and confined to tasks within the home compound. As a result of their "invisibility" and the difficulty researchers had in penetrating the seclusion of purdah, the agricultural work women were doing—seed preservation and storage, rice and other food processing, vegetable and fruit growing, poultry raising and livestock care—remained obscure. Consequently national planning for development has focused primarily upon men, even to the point of giving men those aspects of women's work that is seen as productive of extra income. Family planning is likewise handicapped by the seclusion of rural women and their limited participation in family decision-making.

TAHRUNNESA ABDULLAH, born in 1937 in Jessore, in the portion of India that became Bangladesh, studied social work. At the age of 23 she began organizing a crippled children's center. Later, after two years as a district health education officer, she became an instructor at the now Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development in Comilla, working with women on adult literacy, nutrition and creation of cooperatives to promote income generating programs based on women's subsistence level agricultural activities. In 1974 she was appointed Joint Director of the government's Integrated Rural Development Program where her special concern has been creation of women's cooperatives and family planning.

By her modesty and sincerity Mrs. ABDULLAH won the confidence of rural women so long semi-isolated. She and associates gathered the facts and gained the understanding essential to designing a sound program, and identified farmers' wives who were potential leaders and enlisted them in training classes. Necessarily, these were courageous women, ready to endure public, usually male, scorn in their villages in order to take the first small steps toward improving their families' livelihood.

From such modest beginnings, 180 rural women's cooperative societies now are functioning in 19 thanas, one in every district, with nearly 5,000 shareholding members. Their small industries are all based on work customarily done by women and geared to utilizing local resources. The objective is to expand their activities so as to produce marketable surpluses.

In leading the rural women of Bangladesh to a new and more effective role in their society, Mrs. ABDULLAH is challenging entrenched traditional customs. Through her dedication, patience and creativity she is mobilizing these Muslim women, themselves, to sever the bonds that must be removed for national village progress, and has herself become a respected voice in national councils.

In electing TAHRUNNESA AHMED ABDULLAH to receive the 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes her leading rural Bangladeshi Muslim women from the constraints of purdah toward more equal citizenship and fuller family responsibility.