Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh

Sabina Faiz Rashid is Professor and Mushtaque Chowdhury Chair in Health and Poverty of BRAC James P. Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Bangladesh, The position was endowed by the founder of BRAC, the Late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. She was former Dean of BRAC School (2013-2023). Her research and teaching focuses on urban informal settlement communities, adolescents, and marginalised groups, including refugee populations and sexual minorities in Bangladesh.

"This is an utterly absorbing account of the lives and health of poor women living in Dhaka’s urban slums. It is based on the author’s deep engagement with their lives over two decades and the women’s narratives and their voices still linger in my mind. Professor Rashid has taken the social determinants of health approach and shaken it to its core, showing how the ill-health documented here is rooted in global and national economic, political and gender inequalities. The case for a social justice model of global health has never been better made. This is required reading for every researcher and practitioner working in this field." -- Hilary Standing, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, U.K."This is an unusual book. It inverts the usual academic conventions. It doesn’t foreground theory or give us a lot of statistics. Instead, it gives us an utterly absorbing set of narratives of women and their families living in slum settlements over two time periods, each marked by crisis and uncertainty. [...] The book is compulsively readable and accessible. It’s hard to put down." -- Sally Theobald, Liverpool School of Tropica Medicine, UK and Hilary Standing, University of Sussex, UK. PLOS BLOGS: Speaking of Medicine and Health, 2024.

• Chapter 1: The Tyranny of Poverty & Health; Chapter 2: Tyranny of Everyday Life for Young women and their families in Slums; Chapter 3: Life on the Margins; Chapter 4: Social Position, Relationships & Strategies to Survive in 2002; Chapter 5: Relationships, Networks & Survival during Covid 19, 2020 and After; Chapter 6: Police, Gang fights & Insecurity in 2002; Chapter 7: 2020 to 2022: Arrests, Cycle of Resistance & Discrimination; Chapter 8: Battered Bodies, Minds and Hearts in 2002; Chapter 9: Health is a battlefield: 2020-2022; Chapter 10: Displaced Lives: Eviction and Instability in 2002; Chapter 11: What lies ahead in 2022? Chapter 12: Dead End