Youth Festival ends with record-breaking women participation

Bangladesh's Youth Festival-2025 ended with huge women participation on Wednesday after a month of activities revolving around the theme 'let's change the country, let's change the world'.

One visible change is the prominence of Bangladeshi young women in many sports and cultural activities as for the first time in the country's history, the festival featured women competing in a wide variety of sports, including football, cricket, Kabaddi, badminton, volleyball, and basketball.

According to the youth and sports ministry, at least 2.74 million women and young girls took part in 2,931 sports events and cultural activities across the country.

Of the total, at least 855 were football matches and these games were held in some of the remotest parts of the country as so many women have never taken part in such a huge number of sports events in the history of Bangladesh, a press release said.

The interim government and local authorities in the country's more than 500 rural subdistrict towns organised the women's sporting events with much fanfare as hundreds of thousands of spectators watched these matches in a festive atmosphere.

Despite this positive reality, the release said some news outlets have carried stories implying that women's football was under attack in the country. But, the fact is that out of the hundreds of women's football matches played across the country, local people, including madrassa students, disrupted only three games organised by private groups, it said.

The interim government ordered police to investigate these incidents. Local authorities said two of the matches were halted because the organisers had installed temporary barriers to block spectators from watching the matches and were charging for tickets.

One of the disrupted matches was subsequently played, with hundreds of spectators in attendance. Authorities in the towns where the two other matches had been disrupted have held public discussions and determined that people have no objections to women playing football. The disrupted matches may be rescheduled.

The postponement of the three matches was unfortunate, but the narrative that women's rights are under attack in Bangladesh could not be further from the truth. The interim government itself is committed to upholding the rights of every citizen of Bangladesh.

But even more significantly, the record-breaking participation of female athletes and the thousands of spectators who turned out to cheer them on testify to the breadth and depth of support for women's rights in Bangladeshi society in 2025.