areas and bear the brunt poverty even more than males." In 1974 the median marriage for women was 13.3 years and maternal mortality was "very high. "The school drop-out rate for girls was earlier and higher than for boys, a factor which reduced their opportunity to learn ways and skills improve their lives". The hypothesis of the Women's Program was that women would have more control over their reproductive lives if they had some economic autonomy. The program set up pilot projects in one thana in each of the 19 districts the country. In each thana it established 10 village-based women's cooperatives. The initial project, begun officially in July 1975, was to last three and a half years; it had a budget of 16,700,000 taka (US$1,670,000 from the International Development Association (the World Bank agency handling soft loans and headquartered in Washington, D.C., US including US$760,000 in foreign exchange, plus US$45,000 allotted the Ford Foundation. By 1978 women's cooperatives were operating in 500 villages, with a total membership of 18,000; 15 women needed to organise a cooperative and the average one today has members. Over the next three years the program hopes to add a thousand more villages to its roster. The Women's Program is divided into two major activities cooperative and population planning'both of which are supported and coordinated by ABDULLAH and her staff, under the guidance of the IRI director general. In each thana the program is represented by a staff consisting of one deputy project officer and two women inspector who organise and supervise the women's cooperatives and population planning activities in their thana. One male inspector works on male side of the population planning program. From the beginning Abdullah and her colleagues "found misinformation about rural women to be extraordinarily pervasive and persistent." Abdullah's own early studies of village women were just the beginning; the most fundamental area of misinformation concerned the daily activities of the women. Previous researchers who had questioned male villagers about women had been told they work at "nothing" and know "nothing." Rural women were consequently perceived by all levels of society as ignorant, superstitious and without much work except cooking, cleaning and childbearing. Since the urban elite responsible for economic planning was given to understand that women did no agricultural work'and certainly they appear in the fields only under conditions of the most desperate poverty'women were consistently omitted from planning objectives.