She would not bore him with statistics. But she would ask him to believe that in her field, the microfinancing of poor women to enable them to become economically self-sufficient, she could not count on the backing of the men in their lives. In her work she and her teams in the field subscribed to the so-called sixteen decisions of the Grameen Bank movement, and decision eleven, for example, “We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings, nor shall we give away any dowry at our daughters’ weddings,” was not popular with the patriarchy. Sexual violence against South Asian women was present
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