Kitchen Gardening Practices through People's Participation : An Action Research Project of three Marginalized bagdi Villages in Bangladesh <Research Note>

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of households and their participatory initiatives toward their enhanced welfare. The paper will analyze how the marginalized and less privileged bagdi community actively participated and collaboratively worked to learn kitchen gardening technology through a participatory action research project. The project was undertaken among three bagdi paras from different neighboring villages during 2009 and 2010. This action research project was funded by Research Initiatives, Bangladesh (RIB), a donor NGO in Bangladesh. Present study was conducted in 2011 through regular minutes of group discussion of the community people and face to face interview with the villagers using structured survey questionnaire. Hence, this paper has assessed the role of kitchen gardening and found the households of bagdi community have significantly increased their vegetables and fruits production, consumption and family income through kitchen gardening.