WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • DECEMBER 2015 13 carps that they were growing, high-value species. They were selling what they raised in their ponds in the market and buying cheaper fish, like marine fish or dried fish, to eat. As biologists, we are in a box. We looked at it from our perspective of improving nutrition, but we did not look at it from their perspective. They need much more than eating the fish they produce. Their needs are more for medicines and education or even sometimes they don’t have enough money to buy rice. So they were using the cash income generated from pond aquaculture to buy other necessities and also buy cheaper fish. These fish are more nutritious than the carps. When they buy the small fish or dried fish, they eat the entire fish, bones and everything. The nutritive value is much more than the fish that was produced in homestead ponds. We did some studies to evaluate the impact of the involvement of women in aquaculture. One is an increase in income to the households, leading to better nutrition. Also what happened and what we did not imagine was that there was more empowerment. Women had more voice within the family. She could talk about where the money should be spent. We interviewed some of the farmers in the villages. The man says “My wife does a lot of things. She collects firewood, she cooks the food, she washes the household clothes, she takes care of the children. She does all these things.” When the man is asked “What is your wife doing?” He says “My wife does hard work.” That means the man recognizes his wife is working only when she brings cash income. When aquaculture is undertaken by women, she brings cash income to the household and is recognized within the family itself and in the community. With this recognition, she was able to dictate where the money should be spent. That has led to better education of the children. These are the impacts of aquaculture being undertaken by women. We were looking at simple technologies: low-risk, lowcost, low-input technologies. Once they understood what benefit they could get, they would say “Please tell us what additional investment we can make from our savings or from loans we can take from the NGOs so that we can make a higher profit.” We selected some of the women who were more intelligent and got them into seed production and nurseries, and from nurseries to small-scale hatcheries. This is how we involved women in aquaculture development in Bangladesh. cooperative. The donor community has been very generous in providing research funds. Without the availability of funding from the donor community, I would not have achieved much. All these people should be given credit. Without the cooperation of all these actors, I would not have been able to achieve what I have done. Kevin Fitzsimmons: You’ve done a lot of your work with women and encouraging them to get into aquaculture. What insight led you to focus more on women when virtually all development efforts at that time were directed towards men? Vijay Gupta: My interest in women in aquaculture began in Bangladesh in 1986. I was working with mostly the rural landless or smallholder farmers. One man’s income has to keep up a family of 5-6 members. Because men were working as laborers, they were not able to pay much attention to fish farming. In looking at the pitiable condition of women, who did not have status within the family and society, we thought, because most of these ponds were near the homestead, women could be trained to do the farming that would bring additional income and better nutrition and create status for women within the family and society. It was not an easy approach because culturally women in those days were not going outside their homes to work. With the help of a number of NGOs, we did a lot of work in convincing them that this work is needed in their homes, would not take them away from their homes and can bring additional income to them. We did motivation work with them, followed by training. Then the NGOs came forward with loans without collateral and then we started monitoring their progress. We initially started with a few villages. Then, once they saw the success, more NGOs and more villages became involved. I started with two NGOs. Once it was successful, a number of NGOs showed interest. Some NGOs were only working with women. The Learn to Survive NGO was working with destitute women, women left by their husbands. We started spreading our wings to benefit more women and at one time we were working with 34 NGOs. In the process, we learned a number of lessons. When we started working with women, our intention was, if they produced more fish in homestead ponds, they would have more fish to eat, so their nutrition would increase. Women were contributing 10-20 percent of fish they were producing to the household but nearly 70-80 percent of fish produced in homestead ponds were going to the market. We understood their logic because these were (CONTINUED ON PAGE 14)
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