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• Opinion by Jayendu De, Genet Zinabou (Washington, DC)
• Friday, June 14, 2024
• InterPressService

This progress was partly due to increased participation of women in the labour market, particularly in the garment industry, and was accompanied by other significant improvements in women’s empowerment.

However, our recent analysis shows that there are still large differences between women and men. In particular, women’s labour force participation is only half that of men.

Previous IMF studies show that closing this gap could boost the country’s economic output by almost 40 percent. Women also remain less likely than men to obtain a university degree and face greater barriers to accessing financial services. Addressing these two factors could increase productivity across the economy.

At the same time, efforts to close the gender gap face headwinds because Bangladesh is extremely vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters. Like other economic shocks, climate shocks generally hit the already poor and vulnerable hardest. This means that Bangladeshi women, who on average have fewer resources than men, are likely to be disproportionately affected.

Our analysis also highlights several factors that make women in Bangladesh particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and natural disasters:

• Women’s employment in Bangladesh is heavily concentrated in agriculture and informal work. Climate change has a very direct impact on agricultural production, while informal workers are often particularly vulnerable to climate shocks because they lack access to social insurance programs. • International and internal migration are important climate change adaptation strategies used primarily by men. Men in Bangladesh are 16 times more likely to be employed abroad than women, who typically provide primary care for children and the elderly, making them less mobile and more likely to live in areas highly exposed to climate change. • Women in Bangladesh are primarily responsible for obtaining drinking water and fuel for cooking. As rising temperatures, rising sea levels, deforestation, and more frequent cyclones and droughts make these tasks more time-consuming, women’s time poverty is expected to increase even further.

Bangladesh recognized the need to integrate gender perspectives as early as its 2009 climate strategy. The government then adopted the first Climate Change and Gender Action Plan in 2013, which it updated in March 2024.

Renewed efforts are needed to ensure successful implementation of the plan while making progress on climate action and gender equality.

To this end, policymakers should make the most of the synergies between women’s empowerment, economic growth and greater resilience to climate change.

Special attention should be paid to policies that promote women’s participation in the labour market. These include measures that improve their access to vocational training and higher education, reduce the unpaid care burden by expanding affordable childcare facilities, reduce informality and address gender norms that prevent women from seeking regular and better-paid jobs.

Increasing spending on health and education would help empower women while increasing labor productivity and making the overall population more resilient to climate change.

The persistent gap between women and men in access to finance should be addressed by building trust in formal finance, strengthening women’s property rights and implementing women-focused financial literacy campaigns.

Bangladesh was the first country to adopt a gender-responsive approach to budgeting and recently introduced climate budget labelling, a tool to track climate-related spending in the government budget.

However, since gender and climate-related aspects are not sufficiently taken into account in the initial strategic phase of budget formulation, the system in Bangladesh currently functions primarily as an ex-post accounting exercise.

Improvements in this area, as well as more systematic impact assessment of government programs, would enable public resources to be channeled more efficiently towards achieving the country’s gender equality and climate protection goals.

Finally, women should not only be seen as beneficiaries of climate action but should be empowered to play an active role in the country’s green transition, just as they have played a key role in the development of the garment industry and Bangladesh’s growth success over the past decades.

The IMF’s engagement in Bangladesh – including by making it the first country in Asia to access our new Resilience and Sustainability Trust – aims to support policy efforts in many of these areas.

Jayendu De is the IMF Permanent Representative in Bangladesh. Genet Zinabou is an economist in the Finance Department of the IMF.

source: International Monetary Fund (IMF)

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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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