Bangladesh: Infrastructure development and maintenance key for decent work opportunities

DHAKA (ILO News)—Bangladesh could create many meaningful jobs in every corner of the country through infrastructure development that combines locally available labour and appropriate technologies, Tomas Stenstrom, a senior ILO specialist on employment-intensive investment, has said.

Speaking during a strategic dialogue with Bangladesh’s Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), which is responsible for rural and urban infrastructure development, Stenstrom emphasised the need to fully harness the locally available resources, including the labour, in the entire infrastructure development and maintenance cycle to generate much-needed jobs for the country.

With the right partnerships and approaches, one could leverage infrastructure projects to drive local climate adaptation and social cohesion in Bangladesh.

International financial institutions, namely the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), KfW and the World Bank, and other UNDP and FAO, were also present.

IFAD’s Rilla Kirk reiterated the importance of infrastructure for employment creation: “Infrastructure gives numerous opportunities for jobs and economic development that must be grabbed not only in the initial development phase but also in repair and maintenance, which are often neglected despite their potential to create long-term employment opportunities,” she said.

LGED’s Chief Engineer, Gopal Krishna, highlighted the use of female labour in some of the country's infrastructure projects, which employed 15,000 women over a period of three years and plans to triple the number over the next five years.

The local resource-based (LRB) approach to infrastructure development aims to improve physical access to goods, services, and facilities, especially in rural and marginalized urban communities. It optimises and combines local resources, materials, technologies, and knowledge in developing, operating, and maintaining community works such as roads, bridges, schools, markets, irrigation canals, flood shelters, and so on. 

“Combining the use of locally available skilled and unskilled labour, local materials, local knowledge and appropriate technologies has proven to be an effective and economically viable approach to infrastructure works and job creation in many local settings,” Stenstrom said. 

Addressing concerns regarding the quality, cost, and timeliness of labour-intensive infrastructure projects, the ILO employment specialist reassured that a well-organised labour workforce supported by light equipment had been shown to deliver the same level of quality work in some tasks as heavy machinery, competing strongly on quality and cost with machinery commonly used in infrastructure development.

He urged careful consideration of the cost and availability of some of the machinery and its spare parts when conducting the cost-benefit analysis. 

The ILO's Employment Intensive Investment Programme links infrastructure development with employment creation and skills development, contributing to poverty reduction and local economic and social development. 

The dialogue updated key actors on the opportunities to leverage investments in infrastructure and environmental works to create decent and sustainable jobs and identified potential collaboration with LGED in areas of capacity building and skills development for improved employment impacts in infrastructure projects.