Analyzing Women's Empowerment: Microfinance and Garment Labor in Bangladesh

There are over twenty million women associated with microfinance activities sponsored by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and four million women in the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh. In both sectors, women outweigh men as economic actors and as agents of change. Women in the microfinance sector in Bangladesh have received global recognition through the work of Grameen Bank, the 2006 Nobel Prize winner that made microfinance a global instrument to alleviate women's poverty. However, women in the garment industry were largely neglected in the international media until the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story building that housed several garment factories, which killed over 1,100 people and injured 2,500 in April 2013.1In this paper, I compare and contrast two models of women's…