From promise to practice: Enabling leadership for girls and women in Bangladesh

Illustration: TBS

Bangladesh has earned its reputation as a development success story. Walk through a village school in Rajshahi, or talk to a young woman running a small enterprise in Chattogram, and you will see decades of genuine progress. 

Families have invested in their daughters. Governments have built infrastructure. Communities have changed attitudes, slowly, unevenly, but meaningfully.

Yet on this International Women's Day, I find myself sitting with a quiet discomfort that I think many of us share. Progress is real, but it is incomplete in ways that matter deeply. This International Women's Day, under the global theme of "Equality Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow," we must interrogate not just what girls and women have gained, but what still blocks their agency.

Let me be specific. Bangladesh has achieved near gender parity in school enrolment, a milestone that deserves genuine recognition. 

Female labour force participation has grown steadily. And the country has, of course, had women lead at the very top of national politics. These are not trivial achievements.

But look at the 2026 national elections. Fewer than 4% of candidates were women. In competitive constituencies, their presence was even thinner. What does it say when a country produces women capable of leading a nation, but its systems rarely invite other women to the table where decisions are made?

This is not a question of capability. Every week, in our work across Bangladesh, we meet young women of extraordinary intelligence and determination. The question is about the structures around them — the unspoken rules about who gets to speak, who is taken seriously, who is encouraged to lead and who is quietly steered back to the margins.

Leadership does not begin in adulthood. It begins in a classroom in Dhaka, in a school debate in Sylhet, in the moment a teenage girl realises that her perspective on her community matters, or in the moment she is told, directly or indirectly, that it does not. For too many girls in Bangladesh, it is still the latter. 

Social pressure, digital harassment, safety concerns at home and in public spaces — these are not abstract risks. They are daily realities that cause young women to choose silence over participation.

But silence is not protection. It is a form of exclusion dressed up as caution.

Through UNOPS's SDG Localisation initiative, implemented in partnership with UN Women, we are working with secondary schools and universities in Dhaka, Chattogram and Rajshahi to change this dynamic in practical, grounded ways. 

We are not running abstract workshops on empowerment. We are sitting with students, teachers and community leaders to build structured spaces where girls can develop leadership skills, understand their rights, navigate digital spaces safely, and connect with women mentors who have walked paths before them. 

We are supporting women-led university think tanks that plug young women into civic conversations they were previously excluded from.

What we keep learning is simple but important: when an institution genuinely listens to girls, they participate more. When a school creates a safe space for honest dialogue, girls do not just raise personal concerns, they propose solutions. When a young woman is mentored by someone who looks like her and has faced similar barriers, she begins to see leadership as something available to her, not only to others.

Bangladesh faces serious challenges ahead — climate vulnerability, economic transformation, rapid urbanisation. These are not challenges that can be solved by half a population. The country needs the full range of human insight and experience, including the perspectives of women who live closest to many of these pressures and understand their consequences most directly.

Empowerment cannot be only symbolic. It must be structural, embedded in how schools function, how local governance is organised, how digital spaces are regulated, and how institutions decide who gets a seat at the table.

This International Women's Day, I am not interested in celebrating resilience. Bangladeshi women and girls have demonstrated more than enough of that. What I am interested in is the harder work: building the systems that mean resilience is no longer so relentlessly required and where leadership, finally, reflects the full promise of this country.

Sketch: TBS

Sudhir Muralidharan is the Country Manager of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) in Bangladesh and Bhutan. He leads the delivery of sustainable infrastructure and institutional strengthening initiatives aligned with national priorities and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.