The overall objective is to document and understand the implementation process of each activity aiming to reduce women’s vulnerability in disaster affected areas.

Specific objectives

• Explore different types of vulnerability experienced by women at household level in disaster prone areas
• Understand the process of implementation and its output of each activity toward vulnerability reduction
• Understand the status of income generating activities (IGAs) and changes perceived at household level

  

It is evident that the poor, especially women and children are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because of their limited adaptive capacity. In such circumstances, BRAC DECC programme has been providing interventions (capacity building training and/or grant) on alternative livelihood options so that disaster affected ultra-poor women can adapt with the changing environment. This study has been undertaken to understand the process of main activities, specifically whether these activities are being implemented as planned in order to self-motivate the target women for income generation and to make them less vulnerable to the challenging environment. Forty-one in-depth interviews were conducted. Semi-structured checklists were used to interview programme staff, women receiving training or grants, and other men and women who didn’t receive any intervention.  Most of the respondents receiving interventions didn’t know the term “climate change”, but they perceived environmental changes in terms of rising temperature, irregularity in rainfall, salinity problem, and crisis of safe drinking water, etc. The women developed business knowledge on seven income generating activities (IGAs) e.g., grocery shops, rice processing from paddy, poultry farming, tailoring, net making, crab fattening, and nursery. The women who received grants were involved with some of these IGAs. A major share of their income was reinvested to keep the business on track. The rest of the money mostly was spent in buying food, treatment and children’s education. The women who received just training couldn’t initiate their business venture due to lack of money in spite of having business knowledge. The non-participant men and women became aware of programme activities which were to show the way of income generation and both parties opined that women were more vulnerable to natural disasters than men due to varied reasons. According to the training participants and programme staff, all the training participants are poor who needed financial support for income generation. Simply capacity building training on IGAs was not enough to make the ultra-poor economically better-off. Areas requiring further attention are more manpower at field level, grant to all training participants and training on keeping account of daily business transactions.