Building an equitable future? BRAC’s STAR program and young women’s economic empowerment in Bangladesh

Nicola Banks, Nusrat Jahan, Tasmiah Rahman, Asma Tabassum, Joydeep Sinha Roy and Shifur Rahman Shakil

Development in Practice, 2024, vol. 34, issue 2, 177-187

Abstract: Equitable futures depend upon better employment outcomes for young women. We use a skills ecosystems approach to explore how youth skills development programs can maximise their impact in highly gendered societies and labour markets. While improving employment outcomes and incomes for young women, BRAC’s STAR program cannot withstand Bangladesh’s deep-rooted and socially restrictive norms and practices. Short-term successes are diluted as family pressures and commitments take precedent over young women’s economic lives. Adding a temporal dimension to the concept of skills ecosystems, these findings highlight that maintaining these impacts requires constant renegotiation and advocacy to challenge the structural obstacles within households and labour markets and within national policies and investments that constrain their longer-term economic empowerment.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09614524.2023.2229077 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdipxx:v:34:y:2024:i:2:p:177-187

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cdip20

DOI: 10.1080/09614524.2023.2229077

Access Statistics for this article

Development in Practice is currently edited by Emily Finlay

More articles in Development in Practice from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().