Dhaka Low Income Area Gender, Inclusion, and Poverty Survey 2018 (Bangladesh)

Abstract

The 2018 Dhaka Low Income Area Gender, Inclusion, and Poverty (DIGNITY) survey attempts to fill in the data and knowledge gaps on women's economic empowerment in urban areas, specifically the factors that constrain women in slums and low-income neighborhoods from engaging in the labor market and supplying their labor to wage earning or self-employment. While an array of national-level datasets has collected a wide spectrum of information, they rarely comprise all of the information needed to study the drivers of Female Labor Force Participation (FLFP). This data gap is being filled by the primary data collection of the specialized DIGNITY survey; it is representative of poor urban areas and is specifically designed to address these limitations. The DIGNITY survey collected information from 1,300 urban households living in poor areas of Dhaka in 2018 on a range of issues that affect FLFP as identified through the literature. These range from household composition and demographic characteristics to socioeconomic characteristics such as detailed employment history and income (including locational data and travel details); and from technical and educational attributes to issues of time use, migration history, and attitudes and perceptions.

The DIGNITY survey was designed to shed light on poverty, economic empowerment, and livelihood in urban areas of Bangladesh. It has two main modules: the traditional household module (in which the head of household is interviewed on basic information about the household); and the individual module, in which two respondents from each household are interviewed individually. In the second module, two persons - one male and one female from each household, usually the main couple, are selected for the interview. The survey team deployed one male and one female interviewer for each household, so that the gender of the interviewers matched that of the respondents. Collecting economic data directly from a female and male household member, rather than just the head of the household (who tend to be men in most cases), was a key feature of the DIGNITY survey.