Women in rural Bangladesh rarely get an opportunity to work outside their homes and earn their own income. Now hundreds of thousands of women are being employed on construction sites across the country, helping to build and maintain infrastructure in their communities whilst working their way out of poverty.

Families living in the world’s largest refugee camp this week received the first 2,500 stoves and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders that are part of a United Nations project to protect the environment and build resilience for people living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The “SAFE Plus” (Safe Approaches to Fuel and...

While there has been an unprecedented achievement in poverty reduction in the last three decades, eradicating extreme poverty and halving poverty by 2030 are still two of our greatest challenges. Today, about 767 million people continue to live in extreme poverty. Roughly, two thirds of the extreme poor live in...

With grafting, a young shoot from a preferred mango variety is attached to a seedling. The seedling will develop the root and base of the tree. This is called the rootstock. The young shoot that is grafted onto the rootstock is called the scion. This will develop into the canopy....

This factsheet contributes to FAO Organizational Strategic Objective 1 "Eradicate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition", Strategic Objective 2 "Increase and improve provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner", and Strategic Objective 3 "Reduce rural poverty". The purpose of this factsheet is to briefly...

Ms. Shazada Begum, President of Kendrio Krishak Moitree (KKM) and Vice President of the Asian Farmers’ Association (AFA), has been honoured with the “RTV Alokito Nari 2017″ (Enlightened Woman) award. This is one of the most prestigious awards in Bangladesh that honours change makers like Shazada.

Located in the extreme southeastern part of the country, the districts that comprise the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) are both geographically and socio-culturally distinct from the rest of Bangladesh. Food insecurity is both chronic and widespread, and nutrition levels are among the lowest in the country. In 2013, FAO began activities in CHT...

In poor households in Bangladesh, women participate in aquaculture much less than men. To increase women’s involvement, the USAID-funded Aquaculture for Income and Nutrition project has introduced gill nets, which enable women to quickly and easily harvest small fish from their household pond. This has helped increase households' access to...

Past agricultural mechanization efforts in Ghana and Nigeria have focused more on the styles of machinery used in western countries or Latin America, where average farm sizes are much larger. While West African countries, particularly Ghana, are still relatively land abundant compared to Bangladesh, seeking the right balance across various...

Across the developing world, rural women play a crucial role in agriculture and farming. And Bangladesh, where women exceed 50 percent of the agricultural labour force, is no exception. So it’s no surprise that much of FAO’s work in the country has focused on supporting rural women farmers across a variety...

The overall objective of the ER+ component is to assist ultra-poor women and their families in disaster-prone areas of Bangladesh in lifting themselves above the lower poverty line toward greater food security. To achieve the objective, a third “promotional” year has been introduced to ER, during which women—either ER laborers/trainees...

De-centralized knowledge service is vital for empowering the knowledge deprived poor people. Aiming to provide contextualized and localized knowledge for the poor communities and developing a channel of reliable information for its various clients, Practical ActionBangladesh promotes grass root Knowledge Centres called GyanerHaat.

Farmers face great difficulties with drying their seeds because seed absorbs moisture from the soil. As a result, seed quality deteriorates, and no-one can expect good yields by using poor quality seed. In this video you can see how farmers of Maria village solved this problem. Now they are no...

The article describes a community based seed enterprise for rice seeds, set up as part of a project in the Kurigram region of Bangladesh. The enterprise generates income for the seed growers, processors and traders, but the seed is also cheaper than other seed on the market because of the...

The two studies in this report explore these issues further using empirical quantitative surveys as well as qualitative fieldwork from a cross-section of developing economies in South and SouthEast Asia. The first study is an empirical investigation of the digital gender divide amongst the poor (broadly called the Bottom of...

While Bangladesh is more advanced in terms of agricultural mechanization, Ethiopia and Kenya can repeat the same success. Indeed, Ethiopia is one step ahead of Bangladesh in that it has developed an agricultural mechanization strategy – something Bangladesh has not done. This strategy is now being used to address the...

In the context of increasing vulnerability to climate change for people dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, the International Food Policy Research Institute and partner organizations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, and Bangladesh undertook a project broadly aiming to create knowledge that will help policymakers and development agencies to strengthen...

Four traditional farming systems in Bangladesh and Japan have been designated today by FAO as "Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems."

This paper investigates the relationship between adoption of modern rice varieties and rice varietal diversity on household farms in Bangladesh. As shown in previous studies, adoption of modern varieties depends on agroecological- and input-related factors, including the availability and use of irrigation facilities, such as tubewells. Having irrigation affects the...

Building on its remarkable social and economic performance over the past 20 years, Bangladesh has recently been classified as a lower-middle-income country and aims to reach upper-middle-income country status by 2021. To achieve this, the Government of Bangladesh will need to overcome considerable challenges in agricultural development and rural economic...