Motivation
Bangladesh’s garment industry employs millions of women, offering higher wages than many alternatives, but is marked by poor working conditions, harassment, and safety concerns. Workers typically find jobs through referrals or door-to-door searches, leaving them with incomplete information on wages, vacancies, and conditions at nearby factories. Evidence shows women highly value better working environments, yet often cannot identify or access them. This study investigates whether a hybrid in-person and digital intervention can reduce information frictions and ultimately improve women’s labour market outcomes.
Objective
This extension to an existing randomized controlled trial (RCT) tests whether providing garment workers with structured job information improves worker wages, mobility, beliefs about working conditions, and measures of job quality. In partnership with the Centre for Entrepreneurial Development at BRAC University, information about job characteristics, job vacancies, or both was shared via in-person visits to build trust, plus follow-up text messages. Early results show that workers revised their beliefs about factory quality, reported more problems to management, and became more willing to negotiate promotions or consider leaving. WEE-Connect funding supports longer-term data collection and analysis of spillover effects, testing whether information effects persist, spread, and improve women’s welfare.
Proposed Impact
This study will provide rare causal evidence on how digital connectivity can reduce labor market frictions for low-income women. If effective, simple text-based information systems could help women identify better workplaces, leading to improved wages, safer conditions, and greater bargaining power. Findings will directly inform stakeholders in Bangladesh’s garment factory ecosystem on whether returning factory data to workers benefits both workers and firms by improving job matches, reducing turnover, and increasing productivity. By rigorously testing the combination of in-person trust-building with digital updates, this approach offers a scalable model for strengthening women’s agency in labour markets across low-income settings.
