Gender Based Inequalities in Learning for Mitigating Disaster Risk in Bangladesh: How ODL can Help?

Abstract

No doubt about that Bangladesh is a disaster prone country. This country is experienced by natural and human induced disasters on an average every year. The severity of these disasters on people is not equal. In most cases, women are mostly affected by natural disasters than the men. Gender based inequalities in every sector make the women vulnerable to disaster because of patriarchal thinking of the policy makers and other stakeholders in disaster risk mitigation. These inequalities are rooted in the unevenness of social, political, economic and educational opportunity. The vulnerability of women to disaster refers to the socio-economic poor condition of women. Social status, economic, cultural and religious constraints allow the women to have comparatively less opportunity for learning, earning, accessing and controlling which adversely affect their confidence and self-preventing initiatives during and after the disaster. The present paper aims at identifying the causes of gender based inequalities in learning for mitigating disaster risk and formulate an ODL model. This paper also explains the status of women’s participation in the existing knowledge sharing programs on disaster risk mitigation and unearths the barriers of women. This paper finally presents a strategy for disaster affected women how they can be learned from ODL. This paper includes quantitative and qualitative data. A combination of desktop review and survey method are used in the study. For secondary data, the related journals, books, periodicals and reports are reviewed. For primary data, 20 randomly selected vulnerable women have been interviewed. Some data are collected from the key informants by using KII. // Paper ID 505