Employment for Marginalised Gender-Diverse Communities
First to be let go, last to be hired back
The pandemic did not distribute its economic damage evenly. As Bangladesh entered nationwide lockdown, tens of millions of people in informal and labour-intensive sectors lost their income — and within that crisis, gender-diverse people occupied the most exposed position of all.
The pattern was consistent and it was not accidental. Where workplaces cut staff, gender-diverse employees were let go first. Where hiring resumed, they were passed over — sometimes with explanations that barely concealed the real reason. The informal work many relied on, private tuition especially, disappeared entirely when institutions closed. Research from the period recorded community members describing exactly this: interviews refused on invented grounds, workplaces impossible to remain in, income sources gone with nothing to replace them.
The consequences reached well beyond income. People who lost their earnings were pushed back into households that had rejected them, or that tolerated them only as long as they contributed financially. Domestic violence rose sharply. So did the mental health toll of dependence, confinement and hostility with no way out.
Noboprobhaat Foundation’s response rested on a simple judgement: for a community locked out of employment by discrimination, relief payments would help for a month, but self-employment could change the position permanently. A person with a marketable skill and the equipment to use it does not need an employer’s approval to earn.
What the project set out to do
Build a marketable skill. Deliver practical training in garment design, cutting, sewing and marketing — skills with genuine demand in both domestic and export markets.
Provide the means of production. Equip every graduate with their own sewing machine, so that training translated immediately into the ability to earn rather than into a certificate with nothing behind it.
Connect to markets. Build the business links needed to sell what participants produced, so that new enterprises had buyers from the start and were not left to fail for want of a customer.
What the project achieved in numbers
Skill, equipment, market
Two Months of Practical Training
Forty-two participants were trained by expert instructors in garment design, cutting, sewing and marketing — taught to export-quality standards rather than as a hobby course. Training ran daily across the two-month period, delivered under strict hygiene protocols so that a project responding to the pandemic did not become a means of spreading it.
A Sewing Machine for Every Graduate
Each of the 42 participants received their own sewing machine on completing the training. This was the decisive design choice: training alone leaves people skilled but still dependent on someone else’s equipment and someone else’s hiring decision. Equipment in hand meant a graduate could begin earning the week the course ended.
Market Linkage & Business Support
The project did not stop at the point of handover. Business networks were built to sell what participants produced — identifying buyers and creating routes to market — on the reasoning that the most common cause of failure for a new micro-enterprise is not lack of skill but lack of customers.
Targeting Those With Least to Fall Back On
Selection prioritised community members who were homeless or without any income, identified through the organisation’s direct knowledge of the community rather than through open advertisement — reaching people who would not have been captured by a formal application process, and for whom no other support was available.
The change it leaves behind
Of the 42 people trained, 35 went on to run their own businesses — a conversion rate that says something about both the participants and the design. The equipment did not have to be returned. The skill did not expire with the funding. Several years on, this remains one of the clearest illustrations of what Noboprobhaat Foundation understood early: that for a community excluded from employment by prejudice, the route to security runs through independence rather than through persuading employers to change their minds.
- ✓Skills plus assets, not skills alone: pairing training with equipment is what turned a course into a livelihood — the difference between being qualified and being able to work.
- ✓Self-employment answers discrimination directly: where hiring is closed by prejudice, working for oneself removes the gatekeeper from the equation entirely.
- ✓Economic independence is protection: participants who regained an income regained standing within households where their tolerance had been conditional on it.
- ✓A foundation for what followed: the approach proven here — skills, assets and market access together — continues in the organisation’s livelihoods work and in its inclusive social enterprise, NoboRong Crafts Collection.
A person with a marketable skill and the equipment to use it does not need an employer’s approval to earn.