Impact of NGOs on women's empowerment and voice in Bangladesh

Bangladesh continues to experience persistent gender inequalities shaped by cultural, religious, and social norms. Within its patriarchal social structure, women’s roles are commonly limited to reproductive work or household-based productive activities. These tasks are essential to family well-being but unpaid, undervalued, and routinely overlooked compared to men’s work (Efroymson et al., 2007). These norms have historically constrained women’s visibility, mobility, and participation in the public sphere. The expansion of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) marked an important shift in this landscape. Bangladesh’s NGO sector is heterogeneous, with diverse organizational structures, management styles, and ideological orientations that span both service-delivery and movement-based models (Kabeer, 2002). The rapid growth of NGOs starting in the 1980s is driven largely by increases in donor funding, which signaled a move away from earlier approaches focused on promoting political mobilization and accountability of government toward more service-oriented delivery systems (Rahman, 2006). Over the last decades, many of these service-delivery organizations have incorporated advocacy and rights-based strategies into their work (Nazneen, 2008). Through these evolving programmes, NGOs highlighted and strengthened the contributions of underprivileged women as economic actors and active participants in development and political process. However, despite this progress, there is still no clear empirical evidence from Bangladesh that directly links the presence of NGOs to improvements in women’s agency, voice, and empowerment.