A year after uprising, Bangladesh's youth struggle to find jobs

Economic Times

4 days ago

Synopsis
Bangladesh faces a youth unemployment crisis after political upheaval. Quota reforms sparked protests, but job creation lags. Garment factory closures worsen the situation. The interim government plans training and seeks investment. US tariffs and aid cuts pose further threats. Experts urge support for existing businesses and focus on livelihoods. Private investment is crucial for job growth.
AP Students clash with police during a protest over the allocation of government jobs, in Dhaka, Bangladesh A year after an uprising forced the Sheikh Hasina regime in Bangladesh out of power, challenges persist to address the severe lack of jobs among youth who took their grievances to the streets. The uprising, in which some 1,400 people were killed, according to the United Nations, was sparked by the issue of quota reservations in civil service recruitment tests. More than half of highly sought-after government jobs were reserved for certain designated groups, including women, disabled people and descendants of veterans of the 1971 War of Independence. The country's high court has since reduced the quota reservations to 7%. Since the interim government headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took over, a broad agenda of reform has been drawn up, but experts say a lack of opportunities for the young workforce remains a problem.
"Amid jobless growth faced by the country's youth, a fair chance at civil service recruitment tests became a rallying cry," said Tuhin Khan, a leading activist in the quota reform movement and the July uprising. "But since then, we have not seen enough meaningful focus from the government on the economic pressures faced by ordinary people as politics took center stage," he added. About 30% of Bangladeshi youth are neither employed nor in school or training, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). Also, about 23% of young women are unemployed compared with 15% of young men - and last year's protests featured the wide participation of young women. Women in Bangladesh typically have limited opportunities for employment and career growth beyond a few sectors like government, non-governmental organizations and education. The protesters ranged from graduate students seeking government jobs to garment workers and balloon sellers, as segments of the urban poor demanded better, more dignified lives, said Maha Mirza, a researcher who teaches economics at Jahangirnagar University. But the creation of decent jobs depends upon jump-starting investment, which may have to wait for an elected government to be sworn in, said Rashed Al Mahmood Titumir, a professor of Development Studies at Dhaka University. "When we have a stable policy regime, there would be more investment, and that will bring in the much-needed jobs for young people, including graduates and women," he said.
JOB LOSSES While the protest focused on government jobs, those can provide for only a small slice of the job market. Last year, about 18,000 government recruitments were available, yet more than 2 million young people enter the job market each year. One major employer of young people is the garment and textile sector, but a number of factories shut down due to political changeover, including more than a dozen factories owned by Beximco Group that employed 40,000 workers. Since the political shift, about 10,000 people have been arrested on various charges including corruption and even murder, and they include a number of business owners linked to the former ruling party. Jasim Uddin was a supervisor in a garment factory in the outskirts of Dhaka, but he has been jobless for months. "I had quit my earlier workplace as they were holding up the payment of wages. Since then, I went from door to door in search of a job," he said. Many factory owners affiliated with the earlier government feared arrest and went into hiding, resulting in plant closures, said Arman Hossain, a trade union activist from Gazipur. "We expected the government to appoint administrators who could temporarily operate those closed factories so that workers would not go jobless - but that did not happen," Hossain said. Additional challenges come from the global economy. The 35% tariff announced on Bangladesh's products by the United States, the largest buyer of the country's clothes, poses a threat to many of the four million workers in its garment industry. Meanwhile, the cutting of aid from the U.S. has left about 20,000 development workers in Bangladesh jobless, said aid agency Caritas.
EFFORT AND RESULTS The interim government has announced training programs for young people and courted foreign investment to create jobs. Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuyain, who heads the youth and sports ministry, has said the government had plans to create 500,000 new jobs for youth besides training 900,000 young people. At an investment summit in April, businesses from various countries shared investment proposals of about 31 billion taka ($255.35 million), the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) said. But the share of private investment in the economy has dropped from 24% last year to about 22.5% this year - although in actual numbers it saw a slight uptick from 11,985 billion Taka ($97.68 billion) to 12,484 billion Taka ($101.74 billion), said the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). Investment by the private sector depends upon how much confidence businesses have that the political regime is stable and business risks can be managed, Titumir said. Businesses that employ significant numbers of workers, especially the youth, need support, Mirza added. "You cannot create thousands of industries or millions of jobs right away, but you can make sure that businesses that provide jobs to workers keep running," she said. That could include reopening shuttered textile factories, ensuring the fair price of agricultural products for the country's 16.5 million farming families and providing targeted support to small and medium-sized industries like poultry breeding and light engineering, she said. "We just need a bit more attention to the livelihood crisis of ordinary people," she said.