Nushrat Jahan is 27, works at a private bank near Dhanmondi, and has been transferred across Dhaka and beyond more times than she can comfortably count. Her husband works outside the city. Her mother and mother-in-law cannot stay permanently. Her baby, born early last year, still needs constant watching. There is no daycare near her office. The ones that exist are too far to make drop-off and pickup workable around banking hours.City & Local Guides
"My office tries to be understanding, but there is only so much an institution can do," she says.
"I am doing everything alone, and I am exhausted." She has depression. She wants to go abroad, for higher education, for a better life, for a version of things where the infrastructure exists to make being a working mother something other than an endurance test.
The Scale of the Problem
A 2024 ILO study found that 54 per cent of working parents in Bangladesh identify lack of accessible, affordable, and quality childcare as a major barrier to workforce participation, with 18 per cent having quit their jobs entirely due to the absence of caregiving options.
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) reported in 2023 that only 43 per cent of working-age women participate in the labour force compared to 80 per cent of men.
A BIGD survey of 5,554 mothers in January 2024 found that only 22 Per cent preferred using a daycare centre. The majority kept children at home, relied on informal caregivers, or did not return to work. Child Care
One in four working mothers reported that a spouse or family member had tried to prevent them from working, with childcare cited as the condition for any return.
These are not personal failures. They are policy failures dressed as private decisions. And they are happening in a country that has spent decades celebrating female workforce participation without building the infrastructure that makes it sustainable.
Three women, three different crises
Shaharin Ahmed is 33 and teaches at a government school in Mirpur. She has two children, one in toddler school and one three-year-old.
There is no mother-in-law, no mother, a sister-in-law with her own life, and a working husband.
The children stay with house help during the day. She has noticed them picking up incorrect language and inconsistent eating habits she cannot monitor or correct from a classroom.People & Society
"I am a teacher. I spend my entire day caring for other people's children," she says. "And I come home not knowing what language my own child has been learning while I was gone."
Dr Nadiya is a government medical officer who also runs a private chamber.
Her husband is also a doctor. Their eldest daughter grew up largely on her own, brilliant academically but shaped by the kind of gaps that accumulate when parents are always needed somewhere else.
She has developed an eating disorder. The two younger children benefit from a nearby grandmother and aunt who help where they can, supporting the eldest as they never had.
Dr Nadiya does have access to a daycare facility but does not consider it adequate in environment or quality.
"My eldest grew up while I was busy saving other people," she says. "By the time I looked up, the damage was already done. I do not want that for my younger ones, but I am still making the same impossible choices."
Then there is Afrin, who works a corporate job in Gulshan and enrolled her child in a daycare near her office. It is expensive. It is also close, functional, and reliable. Since the enrolment, the difference has been immediate and measurable.Pregnancy & Maternity
"It costs more than I would like," she says. "But since I enrolled her, I can actually breathe at work. I did not know what that felt like before."
Afrin is the only woman in this picture with something resembling a working solution. Her peace of mind is the clearest argument for why affordable, accessible daycare is not a middle-class luxury. It is the basic condition that makes showing up to work possible.
What is actually available?
There are 63 government-run daycare centres nationwide.
In Dhaka, eight serve low-income families at BDT 100 per month and six serve middle-income families at BDT 500.
The government's 20 Daycare Centres project is currently in crisis, with staff unpaid for up to eight months and food suppliers threatening to stop service altogether.
Private centres charge BDT 6,000 to BDT 10,000 per month and are concentrated in upscale neighbourhoods. History
For a middle-income working mother, that figure sits just beyond comfortable and just below impossible. The space between BDT 500 and BDT 8,000 is not a gap. It is a chasm.
Workplace daycare is almost absent from Bangladesh's professional landscape.
BRAC Bank opened a facility for employees in 2017. BRAC University followed in 2024. Dhaka University maintains small centres in three faculties.
These are rare and celebrated exceptions in a country where the vast majority of offices, both government and private, offer nothing.
Women piece together what they can, house help of variable reliability, relatives who may or may not be available, neighbours and informal networks, and call it an arrangement because there is no honest word for something so precarious.
The cost of doing nothing
About 45 per cent of women leave the workforce after giving birth in Bangladesh. Each departure represents lost income, lost professional trajectory, and lost financial autonomy. The children left in informal care face their own costs, developmental inconsistencies, language gaps, and nutritional fluctuations.Family Law
In Dr Nadiya's household, the cost of an inadequate arrangement became something diagnosable in her eldest daughter.
These are not isolated cases. They are the accumulated result of decades of treating childcare as a private problem rather than a public responsibility.
The Ministry of Women and Children Affairs launched a Roadmap for Childcare in Bangladesh in November 2024 with ILO technical assistance. It is a start. But a roadmap is not a daycare centre, and a framework is not a functioning facility.
The working women are not waiting for policy timelines. They are navigating the crisis this morning, at drop-off, with a baby in their arms and an office that starts in forty minutes.
Nushrat wants to leave the country. Shaharin watches her youngest from a distance and hopes for the best. Dr Nadiya knows what hoping for the best actually costs. And Afrin, the only one who found something that works, pays more than she should.
The infrastructure exists elsewhere. The will to build it here is what remains in question. Child Care
