STUDY ON WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN TRADITIONAL DAIRYING IN SOME SELECTED AREAS OF COX’SBAZAR DISTRICT

Abstract

The lack of detailed understanding of women’s role in livestock production has been the common theme throughout in this paper. Men often underrate women’s participation in livestock (and even agricultural) production, and interviews conducted with men alone may lead to erroneous results. There is a need for gender disaggregated data and gender analysis both in this report to focus upon women. However, these studies need to be complemented by more technical participatory analysis showing women’s technical role and workload in agricultural production, including their role in all aspects of livestock and smallstock production (e.g., portfolio of animals, access to feed resources, veterinary care, knowledge of technical improvements), in the formation and impact of women’s groups and leadership systems and in livestock marketing; and their access to education and training, and to agricultural inputs and information.For the study ,6 union of Cox’sbazar district were selected namely Bodorkharli, boroveola, konakhali, bomobilchori, darbeshkata & surojpur manikpur union;chakaria,coxbazar and data were collected from 25/07/2009 to 20/08/2009.From all, localities total a100 families were selected using simple random sampling techniques. Questionnaires were prepared for easy collection of necessary informations. From the collected data it is found that the overall contributions of women is greater than men in traditional dairying. Except in few cases where male predominate From the information obtained it was observed that mostly housewives (88%) contribute in dairing but most of them are young(age <30y). Their predominant religion is Islam(84%) and mostly are day laborer(32%), or depends on agriculture(28%).They are mostly illiterate(68%),and very poor having kwacha(36%), or mixed(35%) type house with large family size(78%).The report also shows that the farm women has highest contribution in feeding(37.33%), Breeding(47.33) and management(48%).In marketing though women has contribution (18.42%) but not so prominent. But joint decision gets priority (15.15%).In health care joint decision mostly predominates. In other sectors the contribution of women is also high eg; milking (74%),manure disposal (62%), milk selling(58%), watering(68%), but no response is found in green fodder production and in vaccination.