Women’s Empowerment through Employment and Health - Bangladesh

Source: ILO

The project started in August 2001 and is scheduled to last until July 2004. United States Department of Labor is the funding partner of the ILO.

Women’s disadvantaged position arises through severe inequality in gender relations, exacerbated by divisions of class, ethnicity and religion. Discrimination starts early in life, leading to girl children and young women in families getting less care, nutrition and education than boys.A Sectoral Needs Analysis in relation to the Bangladesh National Plan of Action identified the following priorities to enable the Ministry of Labour and Employment (MoLE) to be effective in promoting quality employment for women:

• integration of gender issues into labour laws and MoLE;
• development of a monitoring and evaluation system in MoLE and its agencies;
• improving workers’ and employers’ awareness of gender issues and women’s concerns through gender training;increasing representation of women in trade unions and enhancing the leadership and management capabilities of women trade union leaders;
• increasing women’s employment in the formal sector; andincreasing access of self-employed women to credit and other resources.

The Women’s Empowerment through Employment and Health (WEEH) Programme’s overall development objective is to empower poor women in Bangladesh through increasing their access to decent employment and incomes and to viable health insurance systems, hence contributing to poverty eradication and economic development. In order to achieve this, two projects will be implemented, each of which has been developed in consultation with ILO constituents and other local partners. These projects are:

• Women’s Empowerment through Decent Employment (WEDE)
• Micro Health Insurance for Poor Rural Women in Bangladesh (MHIB)

The Development Objective of WEDE is to promote women’s fundamental right to decent employment and, hence, contribute to the eradication of poverty in Bangladesh. The strategy of the project is two-pronged, involving:

1. the actual provision of decent employment for poor women through direct assistance to women’s groups; and
2. the creation of a supportive environment for decent employment, focusing on strengthening the capacity of Government (primarily the Ministry of Labour and Employment), Employers’ and Workers’ organisations to address gender equality and women’s employment issues.

Direct support measures involve working, through the Department of Women Affairs with existing rural women’s groups (Mohila Unnuyan Samity, MUS) and with some urban women’s groups. The project will strengthen their organizational capabilities for social mobilization, social protection and productive economic activities; identifying and developing new market opportunities and equipping women with the skills and support services to be able to exploit these opportunities (including savings/credit); and a broader programme of awareness raising and training for empowerment.The specific aim of the entrepreneurship training component is to equip women participants with vocational skills and with skills for productive self-employment or for starting small enterprises, including how to prepare business plans, assess market opportunities, do simple accounting and stock inventories, observe proper physical working conditions and avoid occupational safety and health hazards.

Conducive and supportive policy, institutional and social frameworks need also to be in place. The project’s strategy is to help create such frameworks through:

• awareness raising and sensitization on gender equality;
• review and reform of the current policies and legal framework relating to women workers; national legislation to be targeted will be those labour laws that relate to the ILO Convention on Equal Remuneration, 1951 (No.100) and Convention on Discrimination (Employment and Occupation), 1958 (No.111);
• training on fundamental principles and rights at work to enhance the capacity of policy implementers to translate the Conventions into effective law and practice;
• technical support and training of the social partners to design and implement gender sensitive policies and programmes and to promote women’s participation in their leadership and activities;
• advocacy campaigns on women’s empowerment through decent work, and;
• strengthening of institutional structures and networks; it is expected that the close involvement of Bangladeshi legislators and policy makers in the review and redrafting of the labour legislation during the project period will raise their awareness, capacity and motivation to push through the legislative changes.

The project will work with the Ministry of Labour and Employment in building its institutional capacity to promote decent employment for women; the Bangladesh Employers’ Federation in advancing equal opportunities in private sector businesses; and the trade unions in promoting gender equality within the unions and at the workplace.The Development Objective of the Micro Health Insurance for Poor Rural Women in Bangladesh (MHIB) Project is to contribute to the empowerment and improvement of well-being of poor women and their families, by promoting their access to health care through micro health insurance.

The project has three components:

The first will be implemented by the Grameen Bank’s health programme called Grameen Kalyan. The activities include improving the quality of the NGO’s 14 existing health centers, setting up 11 new health centers and extending the existing micro health insurance scheme to twice as many poor women members and their families. A strong capacity-building element, including a training-of-trainers programme, aims to ensure sustainability after the project’s completion;

The second will be implemented by BRAC, the largest NGO in Bangladesh, which will pilot a new and innovative micro health insurance scheme to complement its existing extensive health programme. Capacity-building of staff and their trainers on the concept of micro health insurance and the sustainable operation of such schemes is a major focus.

A team based in the ILO Area Office will implement the third component, which will undertake the development of the project’s training materials and guidelines (in collaboration with ILO-STEP), action research, advocacy and awareness-raising activities through the media. It will provide technical advisory services to all project stakeholders and will build a network, create synergy between government policies and NGOs initiatives on extending social protection to informal sector workers. Finally, this unit will coordinate monitoring and evaluation of the project as a whole.

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