Skip to main content
Project

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

Bangladesh
Project ID
110011
Total Funding
CAD 987,800.00
IDRC Officer
Qamar Mahmood
Project Status
Active
Duration
24 months

Programs and partnerships

Lead institution(s)

Project leader:
Dr. Sohana Shafique
Bangladesh

Project leader:
MBBS, PhD Zulfiqar Bhutta
Canada

Summary

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.Read more

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.

About the partnership

Partnership(s)

Women RISE

The Women RISE initiative supports action-oriented and gender-transformative research on how women's health and their work (paid or unpaid) intersect and interact in the context of preparedness, response and recovery from COVID-19.