Gender, Climate and Conflict: Women Building Resilience in Bangladesh’s Fragile Zones

Jul 12, 2025 | Major Shajeda Akter Moni
Daily Sun
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Following June 2024’s flash floods, when over 2.1 million Sylhet and Sunamganj inhabitants lost all, they had, Shaharima Sharna emerged. A LoGIC community mobiliser, she trekked miles to deliver early warnings. “When a person tells me, ‘You saved us’, I feel our future saved too.” Her story is one among many of women rebuilding lives and dreams in regions destroyed by nature’s fury.

Bangladesh experienced some of its most severe floods in August 2024, which left 23 dead, and affected 5.7 million, with 1.24 million households displaced in eleven districts. 42 weeks of learning were lost in Sylhet alone for children, and gender-based violence increased in the crowded shelters. There are women behind these statistics bearing family burdens: feeding children, maintaining dignity— and asserting tomorrow still has purpose.

Baby Begum lost everything in the 2022 floods; by 2024, she was again clearing mud from her raised hut in Sylhet slums, caring for two disabled sons. She said, “If we give up the fight, there is nothing.” Widowed, underpaid and overworked women like Baby not only carry invisible scars: grief, fear, exhaustion but also unbowed resolve.

Bangladesh is at the forefront of climate displacement. A record 5,02,500 individuals were displaced temporarily last year due to eastern floods alone, and estimates place 2.4 million internally displaced throughout the country in 2024 alone. The burden of loss falls on women: schooling days lost, livelihood disrupted and solitude, particularly in the temporary camps where there is no privacy.
Yet women are not waiting. At the 2024 NAP Expo in Dhaka, Lipika Boiragi, executive director of ASDDW in Khulna, presented her women-designed solar-powered irrigation pump to combat salinity, a pilot project that is now helping number of families. In far-flung Bandarban, Hasina, 29-year-old LoGIC facilitator, has put in place solar-powered water systems for hill villages. These systems now benefit more than 200 people, cutting down the hours spent by women collecting water.