Executive Summary
The tea industry of Bangladesh plays a crucial role in the economy of the country, accounting for the direct livelihoods of over 350,000 people living in tea garden areas (ILO, 2014). Tea is one of the important cash crops and a food commodity for export out of the country. Employers prefer to engage women to harvest tea leaves, as they are more skilled and cheaper labor than. The workers are generally live in poverty and their livelihood solely depends on tea estates for generations and they have no alternative employment opportunity.
SDG target 8.5 calls for equal pay for work of equal value; SDG target 8.8 calls for safe and secure working environments; SDG target 10.4 seeks to achieve greater equality through appropriate wage policies; and SDG target 16.6 is about the establishment of accountable institutions, which are crucial for the improvement of working conditions. Aligning with that SDG targets, to enhance capacity of rights holders or women workers of the selected tea gardens to claim accountability and women’s and girls’ rights Oxfam in Bangladesh and Breaking the Silence (BTS) jointly implemented a project titled “Enhancing social protection for female tea garden workers and their families in Sylhet Division, Bangladesh” for almost two years including the period during Covid 19 caused restriction. The project activities included different types of capacity enhancement training including but not limited to, transformative leadership skills, the power structure in a garden environment, local government structure and role Gender-based Violence (GBV), service provision in education and health facilities, a social protection scheme as well as global instruments of adolescent and women rights protection which are supposed to enhance their bargaining and negotiation skills with garden and local government authorities. Besides creating opportunities for female workers in the decision-making process of the trade union, this joint initiative will contribute to ensuring a decent work environment, maternal health care.
Initially, they have conducted a baseline study aiming to describe socio-economic, workers’ rights situations and identify the ground reality of targeted agreed indicators of the project outputs. The findings showed that the capacity of women workers to claim accountability and women’s and girls’ rights is very poor. Also, they are lagging behind in so many aspects like about 99% of surveyed households reported working below the poverty line. Though 94% of the workers receive ration from the tea state authority yet those are not sufficient enough and domestic violence are prominent at that area. To measure the final outcome from the two yearlong project an End line study has been conducted to assess the current scenario regarding this objective.
Expected Results and Outputs of the Project
The end line study was carried out among 365 women tea garden workers in the targeted three districts of the Sylhet division. However, in the baseline, the total sample was 400 women tea garden workers. In the following graphs, a comparative analysis was illustrated to observe what were the basic changes occurred since last two years after the project implementations. Under the Result Chain Framework of the project title “Enhancing Social Protection for Female Tea Garden Workers and Their Families in Sylhet Division of Bangladesh” Output 5 was to build “Capacity of rights holders to claim accountability and women’s and girls’ rights”. In this endline study we have identified the impacts of the BTS implemented project actions comparing the findings of both baseline and endline based on earlier specified indicators and sub-indicators. Though the Covid 19 has adversely affected the project actions regarding capacity building of the targeted women workers of the tea state, however, we have found that significant achievements on each indicator. More specifically, the project has contributed to women workers have participated in the rights related different advocacy and training workshops, that has contributed to enhance leadership capacity. Moreover, the advocacy action has sensitized them significantly to raise voices as well as bargaining their rights at both workplace and home especially independent decision-making and controlling resources.
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