Bangladesh, along with many other developing countries, is rapidly industrialising and growing numbers of young women are moving to urban areas to make use of the new work opportunities in many of these industries where cheaper products are manufactured for export to the Western market. The garment sector, which has become the economy’s main growth engine, is the most notable. With such sudden growth in a sector so reliant on manual labour, a need arose to recruit many low-skilled workers at low pay. This immense need was largely filled by women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with minimal education and skills who had practically no alternate job opportunities available to them in this country. This very large and growing demographic group finally saw an opportunity to have real jobs with a regular monthly salary. This group was previously employed as domestic workers for urban middle or upperclass families while a few others were working in the strenuous construction sector in urban areas or agriculture sector in rural areas. Women from lower socioeconomic strata in Bangladesh finally found an
opportunity to become respectfully and gainfully employed in jobs and become economically independent and started to contribute to their own wellbeing as well as helping their family members and other dependents. They mostly took low-end jobs in these factories which required them to do repetitive and high-paced and tedious for very long hours. All stakeholders gained enormously from this workforce: factory owners found an abundant supply of cheap labour, western buyers found the market to be reliable, cheap, stable and credible, the government was happy seeing massive job growth, NGOs, women’s rights activists, human rights campaigners and public health practitioners saw millions of poor women getting out of extreme poverty.
However, this almost overnight influx of millions of young female workers to urban centres created unique and massive public health issues. Some are typical of women of reproductive age with regard to maternal and sexual health, whereas some are work-related health issues such as back pain, machinery injuries and exposure to physical and chemical hazards.
