Latifa Begum looked confident with a seemingly ever-lasting smile on her face when she was frisking well-dressed and beauty-conscious women with an intelligent electronic device at the entrance to a plush beauty salon in the capital.
The invariant smile bears the testimony to the professionalism of the 32-year-old security guard who was abandoned by her husband [...]

MICROLOANS were invented to help the poorest of the poor help themselves. Now major banks and pension funds are getting into the business, as they discover that the interest paid by the poor can produce high returns. Is it aid or exploitation?
Muhammad Yunus is the banker of the poor. He took a risk and transformed [...]

When two entrepreneurs examined the limited transportation options available to people living in U.S. cities, they not only saw a business opportunity, but also imagined a way to help the environment. Together they founded Zipcar Inc., the world’s largest car-sharing business.
Halfway around the world in Morocco, another entrepreneur saw an opening in the marketplace and [...]

I recently wrote a short piece on the economic impact of discrimination against women in Star Business. Though my esteemed readers usually don’t expect me to write on non-business related issues, somehow this piece arrested the attention of quite a few concerned.
From the feedback that I have received, it seems that the situation is much [...]

Mongolia has appointed Nasreen Fatema Awal as its Honorary Consul for Bangladesh, a Foreign Ministry official said, reports bdnews24.com.

Nasreen Fatema Awal is president of Women Entrepreneurs’ Association of Bangladesh (WEAB) and the only woman CIP (Commercially Important Person) in the country.

THE contribution of women to the economy is significant but remains beyond the spell of evaluation. It is so, despite the fact that they work at home for sixteen to twenty hours a day. They prepare food for all members of the family, maintain different equipment including those used in kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and drawing [...]

The Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI) under its Women Entrepreneurs and Export Development (WEED) Standing Committee organised a two-day training on personal computer (PC) and Internet for women entrepreneurs.
The objective of the training was to provide first hand knowledge on PC and Internet to small and micro level women entrepreneurs so that by [...]

The country’s local sanitary napkin industry has grown fast in the past 15 years, as consumers are increasingly getting locally made products at competitive prices.
Industry experts estimate the existing market size of the product at around Tk 25 crore, with around 20 local brands available in the market now.
The local brands [...]

More women’s representation both in print and electronic media is needed to help the country move on towards progress, speakers said at the inaugural session of a seven-day workshop in Dhaka on Sunday.
They also urged the country’s media management to create more job opportunities for women in the media as women represent only five-percent of [...]

The garment industry has become the main export sector and a major source of foreign exchange in Bangladesh over the years. It currently exports about $5 billion worth of products each year giving employment to 3 million workers of which 90% are women.
It is a discernible fact that it is, in a sense, promoting women’s [...]

Post-budget press confce on gender issue told:
Shunning the focus on merely addressing the current needs, the government should look to long-term goals emphasising gender issues while presenting a budget, speakers at a press conference yesterday said.
They said the prioritisation process should aim at achieving the broader goals of women-development issues instead of the three-year ‘mid-term [...]

The world- wide trend towards consumerism has created an atmosphere in which advertisements habitually portray women primarily as consumers and target girls and women of all ages inappropriately.
The aim of advertisements is to influence someone to buy a thing. A number of surveys indicate that women are treated as commodities in advertising.
Women are estimated to [...]

WOMEN AND WORK IN A BANGLADESH VILLAGE by Habiba Zaman (Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana, 1996) “Social Reform Sexuality and the State” is a collection of sixteen essays on gender dimensions of social reform and regulation of sexuality, published in the Contributions to Indian Society series, and originally appearing in 1995 as a special issue of that [...]

In support of World Food Day, CABI has announced that its video project aimed at educating women farmers in Bangladesh on improving rice seed yield will reach one million women by the end of 2006.
The video, which has increased seed yield by an estimated 10% in areas exposed to the footage, forms part of CABI’s [...]

Available data on health, nutrition, education, and economic performance indicated that in the 1980s the status of women in Bangladesh remained considerably inferior to that of men. Women, in custom and practice, remained subordinate to men in almost all aspects of their lives; greater autonomy was the privilege of the rich or the necessity of [...]