Despite some remarkable progress over the past decades, the government is still facing many challenges in ensuring women’s rights especially for girls who go through ordeals including child marriages.
There are also problems created by radical Islamist groups who campaign against women development and empowerment because they want to confine them to the four walls.
Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left Dhaka this morning to attend the first ever Girls Summit 2014 to be held in London tomorrow.
Premier Hasina was invited to this summit by British Prime Minister David Cameron with whom she has scheduled a bilateral meeting before joining the summit.
This will be Sheikh Hasina’s first visit to any European country in her second tenure after the January 5 election.
Meher Afroze Chumki, the state minster for the Women and Children Affairs Ministry, who will accompany the prime minister to the Girl Summit said on Saturday night over the phone that there would be a significant number of participants South Asian countries.
She said the problems of the girl child will be a major issue of discussion in the summit as girls still face many challenges like child marriages, trafficking and hazardous work in Bangladesh and other South Asian countries.
The participating countries will share their experiences of how they are fighting these challenges and on that basis they will hammer out solutions to the problems of the girl child, Chumki said.
Government sources told the Dhaka Tribune it had a vision that, by 2012, it would ensure that no girl under 15 is married and would wipe out child marriage entirely by 2035.
The UNICEF is a co-host of the summit that is being organised by the UK government. The summit is aimed at mobilising domestic and international efforts to end female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriages (CEFM) within a generation.
According to the UNICEF’s latest findings Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriages in the world. A recent survey indicates that 64% of women currently aged between 20 and 24 years are married before the age of 18 years, a number which, in 2011, stood at 65%.
Two decades ago, the rate of getting married under the age of 15 was 52% but this has now declined to 17%. Even a few years ago it was at 29%.
A government official said though the proportion of women marrying in their early teens and under the age of 18 is decreasing, this trend is still not up to expectations.
If the rate of decline in early marriage remains the same, it will take more than 30 years to eliminate child marriages from the country, and the government wants it to happen much faster, said a source.
State Minister for Women Affairs Chumki said, child marriages are much more common in rural areas than in urban areas.
Capitalising on the backwardness of women in the rural areas, radical Islamist organisations campaign against the development and empowerment of women.
When the world hails the freedom of women and considers women’s participation a key to development and “Girls have the right to reach their full potential” is the slogan of the first Girls Summit, Bangladesh’s Qawmi madrasa-based Islamic fundamentalist organisation the Hefazat-e-Islam is fanatically campaigning against women’s liberty, education and employment.
Hefazat-e-Islam Ameer (chief) Shah Ahmed Shafi said in one of his religious sermons, “Women should take care of furniture, bring up children and stay inside their homes.”
He preached to women: “You should stay within the four walls of your houses. Sit inside your husband’s home and take care of your husband’s furniture and raise your children, your boy children. These are your jobs. Why do you have to go outside?”
Shockingly, he compared women with tamarind, a fruit that any man would like to taste.
Shafi also campaigns against sending women to work in garment factories.
He also said: “Women go to schools, colleges and universities; let them study till class four or five. After marriage, keeping records of their husbands’ finances is good enough for them.”
“We have overcome many challenges and this time we will also take on the challenges thrown at us by the Hefazat,” vowed Chumki.
