Empowering tribal women through entrepreneurship in Sylhet region of Bangladesh

To promote women empowerment, entrepreneurship provide economic power meant to increase women’s access to economic resources in the households. This paper aims to address the effect of entrepreneurship on specific domains of women decision-making power and how it relates to women empowerment. Furthermore, it examines a specific pathway to better understand whether increased access to entrepreneurship translates into empowerment in intra-household decision-making for tribal women of Bangladesh. One hundred and eighty tribal women entrepreneurs interviewed considering two districts of Sylhet division using face to face interview schedules and Focus Group Discussion. The results generally indicate that four socioeconomic factors as education, personal income, training and association with NGOs, were major to becoming entrepreneurs. In some cases the value of decision goes to the husband; in other cases, all goes to the wife alone; in other cases the value of decisions is shared equally husband and wife. Tribal women become more empowered after entrepreneurship and increased their intra-household decision-making from 0.71 to 1.30. It also found that entrepreneurship had a positive and significant impact on women empowerment in the emerging of tribal economies. It was therefore, suggested that Govt. and other relevant organization should take some initiatives as specific enterprise related infrastructure development, accessibility to loans, enterprise based education, and specific market establishment.