Going it alone: female-headed households, rights and resources in rural Bangladesh

Female-headed households have come into fashion among development practitioners, foreign donors, government and non-government agencies (NGOs) in Bangladesh in recent years. With this high profile has come a tendency to view these households as having a particular set of needs and as representing a neat target group which can be 'packaged' for development assistance. A review of the available literature, combined with some fieldwork observations from rural Bangladesh, reveals a more complex picture than is apparent from the prevailing discourses.