Bangladesh needs to move beyond traditional training programmes towards a comprehensive skills-to-employment ecosystem, as two million people enter the working-age population every year, a World Bank official has said.

“The economy has not been able to keep pace with the growth of the working-age population,” said , at a PKSF-FE roundtable discussion at PKSF Bhaban-1 in Dhaka on Monday.

She said a major driver of Bangladesh’s employment challenge was the disconnect between the supply of training and labour-market demand. Many programmes assumed that jobs would follow training, but this was not always the case.

RAISE, which stands for Recovery and Advancement of Informal Sector Employment, was launched in February 2022 with joint financing from the World Bank and the Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF).

Referring to the project, Rahman said RAISE worked from the opposite premise: it embedded training in the workplace and linked it to available market opportunities.

She called for stronger partnerships between industry and training providers, along with more apprenticeships and workplace-based learning opportunities, especially for young people and women.

The World Bank official also stressed the importance of labour intermediation services, including career counselling, labour-market information, job placement and job matching, saying such services remained at an early stage in Bangladesh.

Rahman said women faced barriers even after receiving training, including caregiving responsibilities, social norms, mobility restrictions and safety concerns.

She highlighted RAISE’s planned home-based childcare model, which would train women to become caregiving entrepreneurs.

Rahman said RAISE clearly showed that combining skills training, mentoring, workplace exposure, certification and access to finance could improve employment outcomes.

The roundtable, titled “Linking Skills with Employment: Challenges and the Way Forward,” was organised by The Financial Express in association with PKSF.