Bangladesh
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Contributing to better working conditions for poor women in the informal economy by increasing their social protection through access to health services: Grameen and BRAC.
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The ILO is implementing a project in Bangladesh entitled "Women's Empowerment through better employment and health", for which STEP (Strategies and Tools against Social Exclusion and Poverty) is providing technical advice for the health component. The Ministry of Labour and Employment is the lead ministry and an excellent partnership has also been developed with the Ministry of Health which supports large Rural Development Organisations in the country, such as Grameen Kalyan (the health programme of the Grameen Bank Family) and BRAC in their efforts to extend health care services to the poor and excluded workers in the informal economy. These workers have no form of social security covering health services. Thus, the project contributes to ILO efforts to promote decent work by linking the positive relationships between economic activities and social protection, in particular access to health care services and benefits. The project responds to the growing need for governments to diversify and extend social protection schemes to provide health services to poor workers in the informall economy is key.
The health component of the project focuses on enhancing access to preventive health care (also for HIV/AIDS) and improved health services through existing and new micro health insurance schemes by poor women and their families. After 15 months of existence, approximately 50,000 poor families have joined the health insurance schemes (more than 90% of card holding members are women) and the health centres have rendered services to at least 135,000 patients. In addition, primary health care and preventive care have been rendered to more than 500,000 villagers in their local communities. The project has also developed specific benefit packages for poor pregnant women. In fact, such community-based health micro insurance schemes also have shown to be instrumental in empowering women to have a voice in the decision on the kind of benefits to include in the limited package they can offer to the members. There are also many examples on how the governments link up with such schemes for mother-child preventive health programmes.
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