Strengthening preparedness for future pandemics among working women and factory workers living in urban informal settlements in Bangladesh

 

The COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to control it have threatened livelihoods, introduced new workplace risks and made unstable work relationships even more precarious, especially for women. This study will examine the drivers of women’s work and health related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Dhaka and Gazipur, Bangladesh. It will analyze the day-to-day realities and challenges of urban poor working women to identify barriers and enablers to their capacity to cope with the pandemic. The objective is to co-create an intervention package, in collaboration with working women, the community, and relevant stakeholders, that will protect them from future outbreaks, pandemics and their aftermath. The intervention will then be tested at the micro, community, and macro levels.

Among the expected results are an effective context-sensitive intervention that will address gender inequality at the structural and political levels; evidence to facilitate the formulation of policies to prevent future infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics in Bangladesh and similar settings; and policy-relevant information that can be beneficial for regulating working conditions and the private sector.

This project is funded under Women’s health and economic empowerment for a COVID-19 Recovery that is Inclusive, Sustainable and Equitable (Women RISE), an initiative of IDRC, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Its aim is to support global action-oriented, gender-transformative research by teams of researchers from low- and middle-income countries and Canada.