The life of a Bangladeshi garment factory worker is not an easy one, but the new research by the University of Washington (UW) suggests something else. The new study indicates that access to such factory jobs improves the lives of young Bangladeshi women, motivating them to stay in school and lowering their likelihood of early marriage and childbirth. The April 2013 collapse of a commercial garment factory building that killed more than 1,100 people thrust the industry into a harsh spotlight and brought attention and concern from human rights groups. But amid the hardships, the new findings show that there is a quiet upside of the factory work for many Bangladeshi women. Economist Rachel Heath of the University of Washington and co-author A. Mushfiq Mobarak of the Yale University School of Management studied data on school enrollment and marriage and childbirth outcomes from 1,395 households in 60 Bangladeshi villages in the year 2009. The study released last month found that girls between 12 and 18 years old who have lived in the proximity of a garment factory for about six years — the average time studied — were 28% less likely to be married than those living in villages in the same district that were not close to a factory. The girls who live near a factory tend to have 1.5 more years of education than their brothers when surveyed. This represents a 50% increase in girls’ educational attainment over villages without a garment factory nearby. The girls and young women who are exposed to factory jobs when they are 10 to 23 years old are 79% more likely to work outside their home before marriage. Overall, girls are 7.2 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in schools when factories open near their village. This effect is especially strong among young girls, 5 to 9 years of age. They also found that in the areas surveyed, the demand for education generated through manufacturing growth in Bangladesh accounts for more growth of educational opportunities for girls than the Female Secondary School Assistance Programme, a large-scale government-funded programme to encourage female schooling “We document the likelihood of marriage and childbirth at early ages drops sharply for girls when they gain exposure to the ready-made garment sector,” said the report. “In summary, access to factory jobs significantly lowers the risk of early marriage and childbirth for girls in Bangladesh,” Heath and Mobarak wrote in the report. A small negative effect to factory job access on education also was found: Unlike the positive effect for those younger girls, those who were 17-18 years old were slightly more likely to leave school for factory employment. “Of course, to say the industry has had positive effects does not deny that there have been serious tragedies,” Heath said. “We think that increased monitoring of conditions inside the factories can allow Bangladesh to reap the benefits of these jobs while minimising the safety risks of working in them.” The results, the researchers write, also provide one explanation, unexplored until now, for accelerated gender equity in education in Bangladesh, “thus generating policy implications for other countries interested in emulating Bangladesh’s success.” The ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh has grown tremendously in the last 30 years and now accounts for more than 80% of the country’s exports and there are about 40 lakh such workers in Bangladesh, 80% of whom are women, according to Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association.
