Khaleda Zia's far-reaching contributions to Bangladesh's education sector

When Begum Khaleda Zia assumed office in the early 1990s, Bangladesh was still negotiating its democratic future and its social priorities. Education, particularly for girls, was fragile, uneven and deeply shaped by poverty, geography and conservative social norms. Over the course of her three terms as prime minister, Khaleda Zia left an imprint on the country's education sector that went well beyond routine policy, reshaping access, incentives and the place of women in public life.

Her rise itself was historic. 

In 1991, Khaleda Zia became Bangladesh's first female prime minister and only the second elected female head of government in the Muslim world. 

At a time when political leadership in South Asia remained overwhelmingly male, her position carried symbolic weight. But symbolism alone did not explain her influence. What followed was a series of education-focused interventions that quietly altered the lives of millions of families, particularly in rural Bangladesh.

The foundations had been laid earlier. 

President Ziaur Rahman, her late husband, had initiated institutional steps to bring women into the mainstream, creating the Ministry of Women's Affairs, introducing quotas for women in government jobs and education, and opening parts of the civil administration and police to female participation. Khaleda Zia inherited that framework and expanded it, with education as the central pillar.

Her most consequential initiative came in 1994 with the launch of the Female Secondary School Assistance Programme. 

The policy was simple but transformative: rural girls would receive free tuition, stipends and incentives to stay in school. The impact was immediate and far-reaching. Enrolment of girls at secondary level rose sharply, dropout rates fell, and the programme became closely associated with declines in child marriage and early fertility. For countless families, educating daughters shifted from aspiration to expectation.

At the primary level, her government reinforced access through schemes such as Food-for-Education and later the Primary Education Stipend Programme. These initiatives linked school attendance to household welfare, recognising that poverty, not apathy, was the main barrier keeping children, especially girls, out of classrooms. 

Education under Khaleda Zia was framed not as charity, but as investment.

Institutional reform accompanied these programmes. The creation of the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education signalled that basic education would no longer be treated as an administrative afterthought. 

Quotas for female primary school teachers were introduced, addressing both employment and enrolment at once: more women in classrooms encouraged more parents to send their daughters to school.

Khaleda Zia's approach to education was inseparable from her broader agenda on women's empowerment. 

In 1995, she introduced the Begum Rokeya Padak, one of the country's highest honours for women, recognising achievement in education, social work and public service. 

Her government also backed legal reforms such as against dowry, acid violence and sexual assault, which reinforced the message that educating girls had meaning beyond literacy; it was tied to dignity, safety and agency.

Her government took an uncompromising stance against acid violence, introducing some of the toughest legal measures in the country's history. Under the Acid Crime Control Act, 2002, acid attacks causing death became punishable by death or life imprisonment with hard labour, alongside heavy fines. The companion Acid Crime Prevention Act set out equally severe penalties for disfigurement and grievous injury, including capital punishment or life sentences for attacks that destroyed eyesight or disfigured the face, breasts or genitals. 

Enforced alongside coordinated efforts by civil society and organisations such as the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers' Association, these laws marked a turning point, leading to a sharp and sustained decline in acid attacks from 2002 onwards.

Health and education intersected during her second term through the Health, Nutrition and Population Sector Programme, which expanded maternal and child healthcare nationwide. 

Improved health outcomes strengthened school retention, particularly for girls, illustrating how her policies often worked in tandem rather than in isolation.

Her engagement with higher education was quieter but significant. Khaleda Zia played a role in facilitating the establishment of the Asian University for Women in Chattogram, helping secure land and institutional support. The university would later become a regional hub for women's higher education, drawing students from across Asia.

Beyond party politics and ideological divisions, Khaleda Zia's most enduring legacy lies quietly in the lives she changed without ever meeting. One such intervention was the establishment of Bangladesh Open University (BOU), a decision that fundamentally altered the country's educational landscape.

Distance education in Bangladesh existed in fragmented forms before the 1990s, through radio broadcasts, audio-visual learning centres, and experimental teacher-training programmes. Yet these initiatives remained peripheral, limited in reach and ambition. It was only in 1992, under Khaleda Zia's premiership, that distance learning was given full institutional recognition through the passage of the Bangladesh Open University Act. 

As prime minister, she became its first chancellor, placing state authority behind the idea that education need not be confined to age, class, geography, or full-time attendance.

BOU was conceived for those left behind by conventional systems: working adults, rural learners, women constrained by domestic responsibilities, and students forced by poverty to abandon formal schooling. By legitimising distance education at a national level, Khaleda Zia helped redefine merit, not as uninterrupted academic privilege, but as persistence against circumstance.

The impact has been profound. 

Millions have since completed secondary and higher secondary education through BOU, many becoming first-generation learners in their families. Teachers, farmers, shopkeepers, factory workers, and homemakers found a second chance at education, often studying at night, on weekends.

In a country where dropout rates have long mirrored economic inequality, BOU became an equaliser. It quietly challenged the elitism embedded in traditional education, proving that learning could coexist with labour, age, and lived responsibility. 

For countless Bangladeshis, academic dignity came not through elite campuses but through modest classrooms, radio lessons, printed modules, and shared perseverance.

Khaleda Zia may not have spoken often about educational philosophy, but BOU remains a statement in policy form: that the state has an obligation to those who arrive late at the gates of opportunity. 

If history measures leaders not only by power exercised but by doors opened, then education reform stands as one of Khaleda Zia's quietest yet most transformative acts.

What drove this emphasis remains largely undocumented. Khaleda Zia herself acknowledged that she had no formal higher education and married young. Whether those experiences shaped her resolve to expand educational opportunity, especially for girls, was something she never articulated publicly. 

Her leadership style allowed little room for introspection; policy spoke where personal narrative did not.

International recognition followed. In 2005, Forbes ranked her 29th among the world's most powerful women, citing her influence and her contributions to women's education and empowerment. Yet domestically, her reforms were often absorbed into daily life without ceremony, visible in crowded classrooms, in stipend cards held by rural families, and in the growing presence of educated women across professions.

What is clear is that she used her political positioning strategically. 

As a leader trusted by conservative constituencies, she advanced reforms on girls' education, child marriage, and domestic violence that might have faced fiercer resistance under a different banner. Again and again, she leveraged legitimacy to widen space for change.

That outlook was articulated clearly in a 1993 interview with The New York Times, when Khaleda Zia framed women's participation not as an exception but as a social reality already embedded in Bangladesh. 

"In the villages, women work in the fields. And in the towns also, women work outside their homes. Women are taking part in cultural activities and politics; they are working in the offices and in government departments, and as doctors and teachers," she said adding, "Our primary education is now free and compulsory up to grade five -- and for girls free up to grade eight. We are experimenting in some areas with a scheme that gives food grains to families who keep their children in school."

Acknowledging the scale of deprivation, she noted that average schooling at the time barely reached two years and that female literacy lagged far behind men's. Yet her response was pragmatic rather than rhetorical, extending even to discretionary support for poor but talented girls unable to continue their studies. 

Addressing religion and politics together, she rejected the notion that faith constrained women's freedom, insisting that Bangladeshi society was neither extremist nor hostile to women's public presence. 

"We are religious people, certainly, but we are not extremists or fanatics, and therefore we are more liberal, and we consider that our women are more free. We have women who are very famous singers, and women who take part in drama on the stage and in the cinema," she said during that interview. 

"From my experience, voters do not see any difference between men and women. They judge candidates for what they say. It is possible for women to come up in politics in Bangladesh now without any family connections. In this, we are equal," she said. 

Today, debates over her political legacy remain contested. But in schools where girls complete secondary education as a norm rather than an exception, the imprint of her policies endures. 

Khaleda Zia's contribution to Bangladesh's education sector was not a single reform or headline initiative; rather, it was a sustained recalibration of who education was for, and how far it could reach.