Our work for Gender Equality

UNDP Bangladesh is widely recognized as a trusted development partner. It has an established convening role and works with public, private, and civil society stakeholders to facilitate more inclusive solutions as the integrator across the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Strengthening gender equality and women’s empowerment is one of the core development needs for addressing complex development challenges in this country. The UNDP Bangladesh Country Office (CO) therefore has made strides to ensure integrating and mainstreaming gender across all its programmes and operations as well as designing and implementing focused intervention on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Both the Country Programme Document (CPD, 2022-2026) and the Gender Equality Strategy 2023-2026 provide strategic direction and a framework for intervention in this area of work.

The localised impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, a global economic recession, increasing climate disasters, as well as political turmoil and democratic breakdown across the globe, threaten to halt or even reverse much of the progress that has been achieved in gender equality in Bangladesh over the past decades. Significant gender inequalities persist, denying women of rights and opportunities and slowing down the development of the country.

With Bangladesh’s graduation from its Least Developed Country (LDC) status ahead in 2026, the years leading up will be formative and will require increased investments into achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. After all, gender equality is not only a fundamental human right but also the necessary foundation for sustained, inclusive and equitable economic growth and sustainable development for all.

UNDP Bangladesh is committed to supporting Bangladesh on this challenging, but promising road ahead. Our strategies for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment seek to dismantle the underlying power structures and root causes that limit women and girls’ empowerment. UNDP’s approach to gender mainstreaming is three-fold: (1) to design and implement gender-specific interventions that uproot gender inequalities; (2) to address gender concerns in developing, planning, implementing, and evaluating all our projects and programmes; and (3) to forge partnerships that accelerate the achievement of our common goals. The approach is grounded in several core principles which guide our strategy for gender equality.

• Human Rights: Our strategy follows a human rights-based approach to development.
• Leaving No One Behind: We consider the multiple intersections of inequalities and aim to reach those most marginalised with our work.

• Transformation of Gender and Power Relations: We pursue initiatives that accelerate structural transformations for gender equality and remove the institutional, societal, political, and legal barriers women and girls face.
• Engaging Men & Boys: We recognise men and boys as allies in closing the gender gap and address discriminatory attitudes, practices and oppressive forms of masculinity that impact both women and men.
• Contextualization: We work in partnership with the Government of Bangladesh to follow a contextualized and country-driven approach that best addresses the unique challenges the country faces.
• Monitoring & Accountability: We hold ourselves accountable to achieving our targets through rigorous monitoring and accountability measures.