Chances and Challenges for Women Working with NGOs (A case study of village Baikh Rawalakot)

The paper entitled “Chances and Challenges for Women Working with NGOs” deals with the impact of women's employment on household structure. It is based on a social research carried out on women's employment mainly in NGOs in a small village of Azad Kashmir in aftermath of earthquake. Many socioeconomic changes have occurred after earthquake of 2005, one major change observed in this area was employment of women NGOs. The qualitative anthropological research technique was adopted for acquiring the ethnographic data for the research in hand. The purpose of this survey was to give a description of the size and nature of women's employment, to analyze what kind of factors influencing women's participation in the economic activities and to study some consequences of women's employment for their families and for themselves. Impact of married women's employment on family life is also discussed, particularly the effect on household activities in the family, the division of labor, family power structure and decision making, etc.. The main objectives of this research were to analyze the problems, that employed women have to face. To find out the attitudes of their family members towards the employed women and to assess the extent to which employed women contribute to her family income.