In March 1997 the Bangladesh Government declared the National Policy for Development of Women. The objectives of the National Policy are comprehensive in scope and rest on the basic commitment to develop women as a human resource, establish women's human rights, eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and girls and to recognize women's contribution in the social and economic spheres. Specific to employment, the plan includes the following objectives for ending women's economic inequality:

1. To ensure equal rights of women on land, capital and technology as well as on all economic resources.
2. To reduce the gap between women and men regarding availability of necessary information, skills and knowledge to benefit from economic opportunities.
3. Visualization and recognition of the economic activities of women.
4. Ensuring equal participation of women and men in professional occupations.

With regard to the monitoring of the implementation of the various policies, programmes and laws, the National Council for Women's Development and the Inter-ministerial Coordination and Evaluation Committee provide institutional mechanisms through which individuals and various women's organizations can participate.

Since 1985, National Development Plans goals for increasing women's employment have focussed on expanding opportunities for specialized training, skill development and entrepreneurship development programmes, and increasing opportunities for income generation, access to institutional credit and institutional capacity-building for the promotion of women’s participation in bottom-up planning.

Promoting gender equality, and "realising the constitutional goal of equality between all citizens - women and men", is a major aim of the Fifth Development Plan (1997-2002). Efforts focus on main-streaming gender in all levels of the governments development work. As such, Ministries are responsible for implementing gender concerns within their respective sectors.

With regard to women’s employment, the goals and objectives during the Fifth Development Plan (1997-2002) are to:

1. initiate necessary steps to implement the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW);
2. ensure women’s legal rights in property, inheritance and related laws;
3. increase women’s participation in decision making at both the national and local level;
4. promote economic self-reliance of women through expansion of vocational skills training, especially in non-traditional areas, managerial training and credit facilities;
5. develop women’s entrepreneurship and create employment for women through skills training in various trades and extensive micro-credit;
6. promote economic self-reliance for women including access to economic resources such as land, capital and technology;
7. main-stream women's concerns in agriculture and rural development, industry and commerce and also in the informal sector;
8. ensure the visibility and recognition of women's work and to reduce the gender gap in access to information, skill and knowledge about economic opportunities; and,
9. raise the rate of female participation in the active labour force (employed) to bring it at par with men;

The National Plan of Action on Education (1991-2000)

The National Plan of Action includes the elimination of gender disparity, expansion of non-formal education and the undertaking of social mobilization programmes. In relation to girls' education, the plan sets the following targets:

1. to raise the gross enrolment rate at the primary level from 76 percent to 95 percent;
2. to raise girl's gross enrolment rate at the primary level to 94 percent;
3. to raise the completion rate at the primary level from 40 percent to 70 percent;
4. to raise adult literacy rate from 35 percent to 62 percent;
5. to increase female literacy rate from 24 percent to 50 percent by 2000

The government of Bangladesh endorsed the Beijing Platform for Action with no reservations. The main tool for implementing the Platform is the National Action Plan (NAP), which sets the following broad goals:

1. to make women's development an integral part of the national development programme;
2. to establish women as equal partners in development with equal roles in policy and decision-making in the family, community and nation at large;
3. to remove legal, economic, political or cultural barriers that prevent the exercise of equal rights by undertaking policy reforms and strong affirmative actions;
4. to raise/create public awareness about women's differential needs, interests and priorities and increase commitment to bring about improvements in women's position and condition;

In relation to women's employment, the Plan stresses the need to improve women's working conditions. This includes increasing the scope of maternity leave, more creches and day care centres, adequate numbers of separate toilet facilities, better transport facilities especially for night work and accommodation facilities for out of station work placements.

The NAP also proposes the development of professionally elaborated gender

sensitive codes of conduct/ethics/self regulatory mechanisms for the medical and media professionals, with the goal of promoting greater respect for women and their rights, monitoring action and taking internal disciplinary actions against violations of the agreed codes of conduct.