Employment Generating Sector and Skill Development Program for Urban Poor

Reducing poverty remains a formidable challenge for Bangladesh. Although economic growth has improved in recent years, the better economic performance has not translated into satisfactory poverty reduction. Recognizing this disjuncture between the country’s record on economic growth and progress in poverty reduction, current policies emphasize that strong economic growth alone is not adequate for sustained poverty reduction in Bangladesh. For successful poverty reduction, the strategies must also ensure that the poor can get increasingly higher share of the benefits of growth. In Bangladesh, almost all households depend on employment as their primary source of income. This is especially true for the poor households since the only abundant productive resource that the poor have is their own labor. Increasing employment opportunities and raising the returns to labor is therefore the mostviable option to reduce poverty and meet the country’s human development goals. In this context, one important issue is to recognize that simply having access to employment is not enough to lift the poor households out of poverty. For reducing poverty, both quantity and quality of employment need emphasis for which economic growth alone is not adequate. This requires an employment-centered strategy to growth in which employment opportunities would expand for the poor along with returns adequate to raise the households out of poverty. Rapid and sustained poverty reduction in Bangladesh thus calls for integrating three elements within the growth policy framework: first, sustained economic grow that reasonably high rates;second, expansion of productive and remunerative employment opportunities; and third, expanding the access to jobs for the poor. The government’s development strategy recognizes the need to orient growth policies toward creating decent employment opportunities for which several options given emphasized on, such as adopting policies for making growth more employment-friendly, increasing overseas migration of workers, and undertaking special employment creation programs through micro credit and employment based safety nets and public works programs. Based on the above note, The National Consultant has been tasked by Urban Partnership Poverty Reduction (UPPR) program of UNDP to identify potential sector for employment for urban poor, find progressive private sector companies from the identified sectors and develop modality of partnership among Private Sector, Development Projects, local government and community. This report is an essential part of the final report strategy the compilations of the field report(KIIs and FGD) is put under a spider matrix and narrow the secondary identification to lesser sectors in terms of labor intensively and pro-poor strategy.