Employees in Bangladesh’s formal sector retire from a defined post and wait, sometimes in vain, for a pension. Informal employees, who make up more than 80 percent of all workers, usually don’t retire at all. For them, there is no fixed finish line at age 60, only abandonment, an old-age home, or a rickshaw pedalled under the midday sun.
Between them sits a third, growing group: people capable of working and willing to do so, but who have no route back into the labour market. For them, retirement brings the loss of routine, contact, and the sense of usefulness.
The Universal Pension Scheme, launched in 2023, covers informal workers too, although uptake remains low. Earlier this year, Old Age Allowance rose from Tk 650 to Tk 700 a month and was expanded to cover 62 lakh people. But the amount is nowhere near enough against the current inflation rate. Meanwhile, the proportion of people aged 60 or older is nearly 10 percent. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), this number is estimated to double by 2050. A country ageing this fast cannot treat its most experienced retirees as surplus.
One solution could be a seniors’ skills registry: a national, voluntary platform where retirees can list their skills, interests, hours, and limits, verified by community references rather than paperwork. Employers, SMEs, and universities could use it to employ for occasional low-intensity work such as tutoring, bookkeeping, mentoring, and craft advice. The purpose is not to extract more labour from older people, but to give an opportunity to those who still want to contribute without having to pretend they are still 40.
This would not require anything to be built from scratch, as Bangladesh’s Dynamic Social Registry already holds records on four crore beneficiaries. A matching layer to account for elderly citizens specifically would cost a fraction of what the leakage from their exclusion itself drains. The Palli Karma Sahayak Foundation (PKSF) already runs a version of this system, wherein it is training over a thousand elderly Bangladeshis in income-generating work. The same could be scaled nationwide.
Given that this will not create permanent posts or have elderly people competing for entry-level jobs, it also does not contain the risk of adding to unemployment. To note, the system has to stay distinct from the culture of reappointing retired officials to their old posts. Permanent jobs must remain for the next generation. Only the know-how of retired employees will circulate, perhaps in projects which their experience can complement by mentoring younger employees or auditing records.
A temporary wage subsidy, not a tax credit only a few firms could use, would make hiring a retiree’s judgement more attractive than hiring cheaply. Union parishad offices could serve as assisted registration points for retirees who do not own smartphones. However, eligibility tied to formal credentials will risk widening an existing gender gap. So, a parallel track recognising caregiving, tailoring, and handicrafts should be available, too.
A 12-month pilot in Dhaka and Chattogram could test whether the model works outside the capital, tracked against numbers for how many register, and whether the initiative affects the hiring of young graduates. Published rosters and independent audits could help ensure transparency before a national rollout. The government’s job is not to employ anyone directly, but to run the registry and reuse the G2P rails already built for existing safety nets, while private firms, NGOs, and universities handle placements.
Of course, this cannot become an excuse for an inefficient pension system. Such an income will not fix a pension system that fails outright, and no government should point to a voluntary registry as a reason to keep the Old Age Allowance frozen.
In the end, retirement should not mean compulsory idleness any more than survival should require compulsory work. Bangladesh needs both a pension floor for those who cannot work and get paid, at the same time, dignified work for those who can work and in fact, want to. For the millions still waiting for a pension or an allowance, an income of their own past the rigid formal system could be the difference between waiting in dignity and waiting for nothing.
Jahin Siddiqui is an economics graduate from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. He can be reached at [email protected].
Tasnuma Akter is an economics graduate from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and adjunct faculty at North East University Bangladesh (Sylhet). She can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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