Will 2026 be the turning point for women farmers in Bangladesh?

Jiaoqun Shi , Valantine Achancho , Gitanjali Singh , and Simone Parchment


Women constitute 58 percent of the agricultural workforce in Bangladesh, yet they remain largely invisible in policy and statistics. PHOTO: MASUDUR RAHAMAN/FAO

The United Nations General Assembly’s designation of 2026 as the “International Year of the Woman Farmer”is a landmark recognition of the central role women play in agriculture, food systems, and rural economies. It also confronts a long‑standing truth: while women farmers feed communities and families, safeguard ecosystems, and drive economic growth, they continue to face structural and cultural barriers that limit their full participation.

Women constitute 58 percent of the agricultural workforce in Bangladesh, yet they remain largely invisible in policy and statistics. According to the latest Labour Force Survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), women perform key roles in crop production, livestock, fishery, and post-harvest production. In livestock alone, nearly 60 percent of smallholder cattle farms are run by women. Despite this central role in agricultural production, these contributions go largely unrecognised, limiting farming women’s access to agricultural subsidies and extension services. Beyond the fields, this marginalisation is compounded by a profound time poverty, with women spending 7.3 times as many hours as men on unpaid care and domestic work daily. This disproportionate burden of unpaid care work is not incidental but rooted in structural inequalities, including unequal power relations and limited access to resources.


PHOTO: MASUDUR RAHAMAN/FAO

Only about 13 percent of rural women have sole or joint land ownership, compared with 70 percent of men, due to inheritance practices, legal barriers, and social norms. Even when women cultivate land, their influence over decisions about what crops to plant, how to market produce, or how to invest income remains limited. The latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that women represent 40 percent of the global agricultural labour force but earn only $0.78 for every dollar earned by men in agrifood employment. Women tend to farm smaller plots and face disproportionate exposure to climate impacts, which constrain productivity and income. Closing gender gaps in employment, education, and income could reduce global food insecurity by more than 50 percent, benefiting millions.

A 2025 joint study on Economic Returns to Women’s Empowerment, commissioned by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and conducted with FAO, World Food Programme (WFP), UN Women, and the UN Resident Coordinator Office (UNRCO) found that targeted investments in women’s empowerment in rural Bangladesh generate a benefit-cost ratio of 4:1, with measurable gains not only in household income and financial inclusion but also in women’s decision-making power, mobility, and community leadership. This tells us that economic investment alone is not enough. Deliberate attention to gender norms and decision-making power is what can unlock the full benefit.


PHOTO: MASUDUR RAHAMAN/FAO

In Bangladesh, the UN system is working with the government and key partners to strengthen the economic participation of rural women, linking production to markets and finance while generating evidence to inform policy and scale successful models.

Across UN agencies, these initiatives reflect complementary efforts to advance women’s empowerment. FAO works through farmer organisations to strengthen capacity and expand women’s access to finance, markets, and business skills, enabling them to take leadership roles in agricultural value chains. IFAD delivers integrated investments in agriculture, climate-resilient infrastructure, inclusive finance, and markets, complemented by youth and women-led enterprises and nutrition initiatives, anchored in gender-transformative, community-driven approaches that strengthen women’s economic power and decision-making. WFP supports vulnerable women in transitioning from food assistance to self-reliance, supporting them in establishing and scaling income-generating enterprises that strengthen their economic independence and resilience to shocks. UN Women provides the normative and policy anchoring that connects these field-level gains to national gender equality commitments.


PHOTO: MASUDUR RAHAMAN/FAO

Where these efforts have reached women farmers, the results are measurable. In rural enterprise development interventions, incomes have increased by nearly 50 percent and enterprise profits by over 40 percent. These are not marginal gains; they reflect what women farmers can achieve when finance, training and market access come together.


This pattern holds across diverse contexts. In Kurigram and Satkhira, where climate vulnerability is pronounced, and in Cox’s Bazar, where complex humanitarian pressures persist, this integrated approach has delivered particularly striking results. There, UN agencies and partners work with smallholder farmers, mostly women, applying climate‑smart production practices and connecting farmers to local retailers and humanitarian food assistance supply chains to Rohingya refugees. As a result, nearly 40,000 farmers have received support and been linked to reliable markets, enabling their transition from subsistence food production to market-oriented production. With access to real‑time market information and skills and enterprise development support, these women are no longer seen simply as labourers; they are recognised as economic actors with the capacity to negotiate fair prices and engage in markets.

Scaling this success from regional hubs to a national standard requires more than technical training. Beyond these market-based successes, advancing equitable land rights and inheritance protections remains essential to fully realise Bangladesh’s agricultural potential. By combining anticipatory action and climate risk insurance with inclusive agricultural planning, the state can ensure that women’s contributions are not only recognised in data but safeguarded and reinforced through policy and law.

At the same time, policy reforms must be matched with effective delivery systems that enable women to access finance, extension services, and markets in practice, not just in principle. Governments, organisations, and communities must move beyond recognition to ensure that women are formally included, equitably resourced, and meaningfully represented in agricultural systems and decision-making. Strengthening their access to land, finance, extension services, and markets is not only a matter of gender justice but also a foundation for resilient food systems and sustainable development.

As the International Year of the Woman Farmer progresses, is it translating into real change such as empowering women-led groups, expanding access to climate-resilient technology, and driving policies that finally recognise women as independent farmers. For Bangladesh, this year is both a call and an opportunity. The evidence is clear, and the returns are real. The only question is whether the ambition to act will match the scale of the need.

Jiaoqun Shi is representative of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Bangladesh.

Valantine Achancho is country director and representative of International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Bangladesh.

Simone Parchment is country director a.i. of World Food Programme (WFP) in Bangladesh.

Gitanjali Singh is representative of UN Women in Bangladesh.​

Women farmers and the fight for climate resilience

Mohammad Julfiqar Haider


Locally led adaptation is meaningless if women within climate-exposed communities remain at the margins of programme design. Photo: Nilima Jahan

Bangladesh is among the world’s most climate-exposed nations. Between 2000 and 2019, the country experienced 185 extreme weather events, resulting in approximately $3.72 billion in economic losses. The average temperature has been rising by 0.20 degrees Celcius every decade. Yet, as the country scales up its climate adaptation architecture, the people absorbing the sharpest household-level impacts—women smallholder farmers—remain structurally underserved.

Women comprise 58 percent of Bangladesh’s agricultural workforce, but are rarely recognised as farmers in official classifications or extension services. Despite constituting the majority of agricultural labour, only 4.8 percent of women in agriculture hold land under their own names—the lowest in South Asia. They work the land without owning it, generate food without controlling its sale, and carry generations of agricultural knowledge without institutional support to apply it.

This invisibility is structurally enforced. Women farmers typically earn Tk 400 to Tk 500 per day, against Tk 600 for men performing equivalent work. Extension services are overwhelmingly directed at male farmers. A 2023 CGIAR study drawing on 1,230 surveyed households in Bangladesh found that gender disparities persist in agricultural losses, damage, and family food consumption, and that climate change restricts women’s market access relative to men’s.

Moreover, climate change is not gender-neutral. Research confirms that women in Bangladesh face heightened post-disaster food insecurity, and the gender gap in food insecurity has been growing. When harvests fail, women typically reduce their own food intake to protect children and other family members, a coping mechanism with severe long-term consequences for their health and adaptive capacity.

Salinity intrusion illustrates the intersection of climate stress and gender vulnerability. Salinity-affected land has expanded from 8.3 lakh hectares in 1973 to more than 10.56 lakh hectares in 2019. More than 70 percent of coastal residents confirmed that salinity worsened over the past decade, while 74 percent expect conditions to deteriorate further. With the soil now too salty for standard farming, the agricultural rules have completely changed. Women who have managed traditional cropping systems for generations find their knowledge made redundant, without viable alternatives offered to them. Meanwhile, the transition to capital-intensive aquaculture that follows salinity-driven land conversion is controlled predominantly by men.

As climate stress drives men towards urban wage labour, women are left to manage farms without legal land rights, agricultural identities in official systems, or institutional support. Studies from coastal Bangladesh show that female-headed households tend to rely on NGO assistance as a primary adaptation strategy—a survival response, not a resilience pathway.

The FAO’s 2023 flagship report estimated that closing the gender gap in agricultural productivity and wages could boost global GDP by nearly $1 trillion and lift 4.5 crore people out of food insecurity. The World Bank’s Groundswell report projects four crore internal climate migrants in South Asia by 2050. Bangladesh will be among the most affected. The household scale, where women are already carrying climate adaptation without adequate support, cannot hold against that pressure.


The LoGIC project, implemented across 72 unions in seven climate-exposed districts, reached 11 lakh people, 63 percent of them being women. It trained 34,953 women in 23 types of climate-adaptive livelihoods, formed 247 Climate Smart Cooperative Societies, and delivered a measurable outcome: 76 percent of grant recipients reported economic improvement. LoGIC won the Global Climate Action Local Adaptation Champions Award precisely because it treated women not as beneficiaries, but as adaptation agents.

Bangladesh’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP) 2023-2050 commits to gender-responsive budgeting and equitable access to resources across agriculture. These commitments need an implementation architecture. For this, three shifts are essential.

First, recognition—women’s agricultural labour must be counted in national statistics and reflected in farmer classifications. The NAP’s 12 agricultural interventions covering irrigation, seeds, extension, and value chains must each specify how they will reach women as primary actors, not residual beneficiaries.

Second, access—only 4.8 percent of female farmers hold land, yet land ownership is a precondition for formal agricultural credit. Collateral-free, flexible credit products calibrated to women’s smallholder realities are largely absent from mainstream agricultural finance in Bangladesh. This gap has a direct cost for climate adaptation.

Third, voice—women smallholder farmers hold place-based knowledge about environmental change that no satellite system captures. Locally led adaptation (LLA) is meaningless if women within climate-exposed communities remain at the margins of programme design. LoGIC’s cooperative model, which embedded women’s voice in governance structures as a condition of programme access, offers a replicable template.

A woman smallholder farmer is not a beneficiary waiting for a programme. She is a practitioner of adaptation, working under constraints that policy has the power to remove. Recognising her as such is not a concession to equity. It is a precondition for any climate strategy in Bangladesh that intends to last.

Mohammad Julfiqar Haider is senior specialist in climate change at BRAC Bangladesh.​