Women across coastal Shyamnagar and the chars of Kurigram spend their days fishing, farming, tending animals, and making goods to sell. Yet unpaid care work, distant water sources, unsafe markets, and repeated climate shocks keep that labour from ever becoming steady income or savings.

A particular silence falls over a char village school after a flood. The benches are empty, the blackboard warped, the floor covered with a thin film of riverbed silt.