The ‘Chhuta Bua’ Culture in Bangladesh : Exploring Women Empowerment in the Urban Informal Employment Sector

The ‘Chhuta Bua’ is the Bangla word for Temporary House Maids. Though Temporary House Maids involve both male and female, but the word ‘Bua’ (in ‘Chhuta Bua’) specially indicates the females. Following this, the profession has a feminized nature in its essence. These women are engaged as wage labourers, self-employed persons, unpaid family labour, piece-rate workers, and other hired labours mostly in the urban areas. Therefore, they are of great concerns for their contributions to fight the many odds of the society, particularly poverty. Poverty is a gruesome reality for Bangladesh among the other countries in global south. Despite the significant achievements in terms of growth in GDP, human development, and environmental responsiveness, Bangladesh still encounters a major challenge on poverty. This paper has made an effort in exploring the ‘Chhuta Bua’ culture in Bangladesh as a way of women empowerment among the poor women from the low-income settlements. By focusing the capital city of Dhaka, this study has extracted the stories of these women in terms of their status, abilities, and coping strategies in the informal employment sector. While exploring the ‘Chhuta Bua’s, the Pandemic situation due to novel coronavirus (covid-19) has been taken into consideration. By employing a qualitative research design, the study has found out that these women have been facing many adverse situations starting from earning a low/insufficient income to problems of social crimes. There are few positive changes too (i.e., saving money to send their sons to abroad as migrant workers). All these have provided them a distinct way of life, a trait of potential abilities, and a significant coping strategies against the existing challenges. Finally this study has suggested that there should be guidelines from all stakeholders to help these women to gain meaningful insights for their empowerment within the informal sector in Bangladesh.