Five Year Development Plans - Bangladesh

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;