Rasha Chaklader

Working Thesis Title: Ageing and eldercare in contemporary urban Bangladesh.

Field work conducted in Dhaka, Bangladesh from September 2022 to January 2024.

Key points:

• The elderly population in Bangladesh has increased significantly during the previous decades. Most of the elderly individuals are experiencing multiple non-curable chronic health complications.
• Traditionally, eldercare used to be provided by immediate and extended family members, mostly women. Hiring a paid caregiver exclusively to provide eldercare at home was not common until recently. Old age homes still provoke widespread stigma.
• Due to internal and international migration, smaller family size, higher divorce rates, decreasing extended family households and increasing women participation in formal economy, domestic eldercare arrangements in urban Bangladesh are going through transitions.
• I collected ethnographic information from a variety of interlocutors who are directly and indirectly engaged in either paid or unpaid eldercare arrangement in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
• My interlocutors include family members providing unpaid eldercare; family members who hire paid caregivers; family members living outside of Bangladesh who arrange eldercare remotely; trained and untrained paid caregivers; individuals working at private agencies who supply caregivers; individuals working at organisations that train caregivers; other domestic workers; nurses; doctors; gerontologists; activists working towards attaining an age-friendly society.      
• I am ethnographically examining how eldercare arrangements in contemporary Dhaka, Bangladesh influence gender relations, political economy of the household, kinship, and domestic work, and vice versa. I seek to understand the complex entanglement of these processes through the everyday lived experiences of my interlocutors, and their wider implications in relation to distribution of care labour, kinship and gender roles, and the wider political economy.