Outcome BGD_D_1.4

By 2026, women, girls and gender diverse people benefit from an environment in which they are empowered to exercise their rights, agency and decision-making power over all aspects of their lives and are free from all forms of discrimination, violence and harmful norms and practices

Notable progress was made on this outcome in 2024. Despite a changed socio-political context, Bangladesh’s commitment to gender equality remained firm. This is evident from the continued efforts to advance gender-responsive national legal and policy frameworks as well as the various advocacy opportunities for engaging women’s rights organizations to influence decision making. UN Women contributed to fostering an enabling environment with various capacity-building and sensitization efforts with key stakeholder that have been institutionalized and sustained over the years. In 2024, the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (MoWCA) demonstrated strengthened commitment to addressing sexual harassment in workplaces and educational institutions by advancing the drafting of the national bill on sexual harassment. This is a long-standing priority of the women’s rights movement since the High Court's landmark directive on sexual harassment in 2009. With technical support from UN Women and through a consultative approach, seven civil society organizations (CSOs), who are the legal experts in the country, were actively engaged in the drafting process. These organizations played a crucial role by contributing valuable legal input to the draft, drawing on their extensive experience to help MoWCA define the bill’s scope of applicability. MoWCA has laid the groundwork for enacting this national bill that will have a significant impact on the lives of women and girls, promoting freedom from violence and advancing gender equality. This law would encourage greater participation of women and girls in public life, while ensuring safe workplaces and educational institutions. UN Women facilitated these efforts as part of broader UN-wide support, under the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) Strategic Pillar (SP) 5. Following the civil unrest in 2024, the interim government undertook a police reform initiative, to make the police force human-centred, accountable, and responsive to the needs of constituencies including survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). This effort was advanced through multistakeholder consultations, held with technical support from UN Women and other 5 UN agencies, at the request of the interim government. The consultations enabled CSOs, academic institutions, youth, gender-diverse populations, persons with disabilities, and ethnic minorities to exercise their voice and agency to demand gender responsive and survivor-centred institutions and services. These inputs will inform the recommendations of the Police Reform Commission, to be submitted to the Chief Adviser in January 2025. In addition, to advance gender-responsive policing services and address GBV, including technology-facilitated violence against women, Bangladesh Police and the Bangladesh Policewomen Network (BPWN) have continued to strengthen their capacity by participating in knowledge exchange platforms facilitated by UN Women. Further, CSOs and women’s rights organizations effectively participated in decision-making processes through dialogues and influenced policymaking with duty bearers. A total of 116 CSOs across four divisions (Sylhet, Rajshahi, Khulna, Chittagong) and Dhaka City have increased capacity by engaging in the drafting of Charter of Demand (CoD) led by Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP) and Bonhishikha, with UN Women’s support. Commitment was secured from the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission—one of the ten reform commissions formed by the interim government—to take the recommendations forward, following a dissemination event in December 2024. In addition, MoWCA further demonstrated enhanced capacity to implement and monitor key international normative frameworks, including the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A critical milestone was the submission of the Comprehensive National Review Report for the BPfA by MoWCA, with technical expertise from UN Women. This was a testament to MoWCA's commitment to aligning national initiatives with global gender equality and women's empowerment (GEWE) goals. MoWCA further showcased its enhanced capacities by preparing the SDG 5 chapter for the Voluntary National Review (VNR). The draft was submitted to the Chief Adviser’s office in October and will contribute to the Bangladesh government’s VNR report. MoWCA demonstrated enhanced accountability and responsiveness to stakeholder engagement. The Country Statement delivered by the MoWCA Adviser at the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Beijing+30 held in November 2024 was informed by recommendations made by women’s rights organizations, facilitated by UN Women’s support. Reflecting the consensus built with civil society partners, the government prioritized five areas – ending gender-based violence (GBV), closing the economic participation gap, enhancing women’s climate resilience, promoting digital inclusion, and strengthening legal frameworks – to accelerate implementation of BPfA. These collaborative efforts underscore MoWCA's commitment and strategic focus on actionable outcomes that advance GEWE. Gender perspectives were foregrounded in the interim government’s reform priorities, with UN Women’s support. This was evidenced by the integration of a dedicated gender chapter in the commissioned White Paper on the State of the Bangladesh Economy . Moreover, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) enhanced its capacity for producing gender statistics on unpaid care and domestic work, by finalizing the preliminary estimates of the Household Production Satellite Account (HPSA), with technical support from UN Women. The theory of change for this outcome remains valid. A key lesson learnt is the need to effectively link integrated multi-layered support to the government, with evidence-based collective advocacy initiatives. Moving forward, the continued alignment of policy and grassroots action will be critical to sustaining these gains and ensuring a future free from discrimination and violence for all women and girls.

By 2026, women, girls and gender diverse people benefit from an environment in which they are empowered to exercise their rights, agency and decision-making power over all aspects of their lives and are free from all forms of discrimination, violence and harmful norms and practices

Progress towards the outcome is on track in 2022. There has been a notable shift in the legal and policy environment that allows women to exercise their rights, agency, and decision-making. The Government of Bangladesh demonstrated its commitment to improving the lives of women and girls by prioritizing gender equality in the country's Eighth Five Year Plan (2020-2025) (8th FYP). Against this backdrop, substantive contribution has been made towards the achievement of the outcome through leveraging UN Women’s triple mandate, contributing to the reformation of discriminatory law; generating data and evidence; developing a roadmap for accelerating SDG-5 financing and strengthening UN system accountability to advancing the gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (GEWE) agenda. The Evidence (Amendment) Bill 2022 has been passed in 2022 by the National Parliament of Bangladesh, which repealed the discriminatory clauses (Section 155(4)) of the Evidence Act 1872. The amended Bill prohibits questioning of a rape survivor’s character during cross-examinations in a trial and incorporates the admissibility of digital evidence critical for empowering GBV survivors. As a result of continuous advocacy initiatives of the Rape Law Reform (RLR) Coalition with the government and informed by action research ( Between ‘Virtue’ and ‘Immorality’: Why Character Evidence Must Be Prohibited in Rape Cases ), the repeal will help to eliminate the practice of re-traumatization of a rape survivor labeled as ‘the second rape’. UN Women contributed to this discriminatory law reform by supporting civil-society organizations (CSOs) for evidence-driven advocacy to influence the legal reformation. UN Women supported the RLR Coalition, led by its partner organization, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST), with seventeen CSO members. The RLR Coalition advocated with the government for major reforms needed in rape laws by identifying patterns, loopholes, and improvements needed to ensure a non-discriminatory, accountable, and transparent judicial process. The repeal of the Evidence Act is a result of the RLR coalition’s coordinated advocacy initiatives under its 10-Point Demand on Rape Law Reform . The Theory of Change remains relevant and will continue to be used by UN Women for the achievement of this outcome. This achievement will protect the right and dignity of a rape survivor in getting justice and will strengthen the advocacy demands of CSOs towards discriminatory law reformation. The 8th FYP, for the first time, recognizes the importance of women’s unpaid care work and includes SDG 5.4.1 indicator in its results and reporting framework, to measure the proportion of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work. The Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (MoWCA) furthered this priority and made a strong commitment at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris in June 2021, to work closely with Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) to address the unpaid care work issue. To this end, UN Women, together with ILO is supporting the government to develop a national programme on unpaid care work, based on the findings from Time Use Survey published in 2022. The data from the Time Use Survey is critical in translating the government’s commitment into action; it allows for estimating the burden of women’s unpaid work and to develop analysis to better design and adopt necessary laws, policies, programme to promote women‘s empowerment within the households, workplace, and society. The first ever Time Use Survey was completed and published by BBS, supported by UN Women as part of its global programme "Women Count". The Integrated National Financing Framework (INFF) is an important instrument to mobilize public and private resources for accelerating the achievement of SDGs by 2030. The UN - namely UNDP, UNCDF, ILO, UN Women, and Resident Coordinator Office - is supporting the Government of Bangladesh to develop the INFF. As part of this, the UN jointly with the Economic Relations Division (ERD) of the Ministry of Finance, developed the first-ever national financing roadmap for SDGs. UN Women contributed by developing the gender analysis for the INFF that reveals an allocation of USD 54 billion is required until 2030 to address the commitments made under SDG-5. A detailed financing framework is developed with ERD, to identify the funding required to address all SDGs targets in Bangladesh. The UN responds to the 8 th FYP (2020-2025) Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) priorities by placing ‘’Gender Equality and Elimination of Gender-based Violence”, as a strategic and cross-cutting priority in the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) 2022-2026. The UN has strengthened accountability to advancing GEWE through improved gender mainstreaming across their joint programmes. Seven out of nine operational UN joint programmes, have visibly mainstreamed gender with sex-disaggregated and gender-sensitive indicators and data and gender analysis, as identified in the Gender Scorecard Annual reporting 2022. The UN Country Team (UNCT) also invested in strengthening staff and personnel capacity with tools like UNCT Gender Equality Marker (GEM) to effectively track and analyze system-wide gender expenditure. The lessons from the training will be taken forward through a roadmap, that consists of regular dialogue and a quality assurance process meant to strengthen gender-related programmatic efforts, financial investments, and results on GEWE.

By 2026, women, girls and gender diverse people benefit from an environment in which they are empowered to exercise their rights, agency and decision-making power over all aspects of their lives and are free from all forms of discrimination, violence and harmful norms and practices

Progress towards the outcome is on track in 2023. An enabling environment for gender equality was fostered by the increased capacity of duty bearers to design and implement gender-responsive policy frameworks and the enhanced ability of rights holders, especially women and girls, at the community level to challenge harmful norms and practices. In 2023, the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (MoWCA) finalized the National Action Plan (NAP) 2021-2030 for the National Women Development Policy (2011) (NWDP). The NAP is a critical framework to guide the implementation of NWDP, which constitutes the core policy document of the government on gender equality and women’s empowerment (GEWE). The NAP will guide all 54 ministries to mainstream gender issues within their planning and budgeting processes and ensure focused interventions. The NAP NWDP, based on the 12 critical areas of concern in the Beijing Platform for Action and mapped against relevant Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators and the Development Results Framework of the 8th Five-Year Plan (8FYP), addresses key structural barriers to gender equality, including social norms, violence against women and girls, and discriminatory legal frameworks. The NAP calls for the utilization of gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) for effective implementation of actions across ministries. The finalization of NAP NWDP marks a culmination of technical assistance and advocacy provided by UN Women over several years (including technical review, support for inter-ministerial coordination, and consolidation of stakeholder inputs). The Government of Bangladesh reaffirmed its vision for GRB at the 2023 SDG Summit, with a dedicated commitment to increase gender budget allocation to a minimum of 35 per cent of the national budget by 2025. It thereby underlines the need to accelerate financing for GEWE to realize the country's development objectives, including the implementation of the NAP NWDP and the SDGs, through GRB. As part of a UN Country Team-led effort, UN Women provided technical inputs on GRB to inform the National Statement of Commitments . Girls and boys enhanced their ability to influence decision-making and challenge harmful norms and practices, fostering an enabling environment for gender equality in their communities. Girls and boys across five secondary schools in Dhaka improved their ability to identify and address discriminatory gender stereotypes through play-based classroom activities. More than 67 per cent of girls and 85 per cent of boys were able to identify gender stereotypes. Moreover, 61 per cent of girls and 31 per cent of boys self-reported increased ability to respond (know what to do) when witnessing sexual harassment incidents, a significant increase from the baseline of 20 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively. This was facilitated by UN Women and its partner JAAGO, a youth-led organization, under the “Ending Gender Stereotypes in Classrooms’’ project. The theory of change remains valid for this outcome. At the mid-point of the 8FYP (2022-2025), Bangladesh is at a pivotal juncture as it prepares for the graduation from Least Developed Country status in 2026. In the run-up to the national elections (in January 2024) the country witnessed an overall slowdown. UN Women must re-strategize priorities in 2024 to facilitate the acceleration of GEWE priorities. The forthcoming development of the national 9th Five-Year Plan offers an opportunity to support MoWCA to mainstream gender across the national development plan.