In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

On October 17 in San Francisco, The Asia Foundation co-hosted an event to raise awareness of the challenges women entrepreneurs face in Asia, sponsored by global architecture firm, Gensler, and co-hosted with the Global Fund for Women. The event featured Ms. Rokia Afzal Rahman, the president of the Bangladesh Federation of Women Entrepreneurs and Asia [...]

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At the second APEC Women and the Economy Forum held in St. Petersburg in June, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that: “Limiting women’s economic potential is for every country like leaving money on the table.

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This week, development pioneer Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC, the largest nongovernmental development organization in the world, is in Washington, D.C., where he concludes his visit to the U.S. as an Asia Foundation Chang-Lin Tien Distinguished Visiting Fellow.

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In a new video, members of the community and the police from Bangladesh’s Rajshahi discuss how The Asia Foundation’s community-based policing forums are helping build trust and increase communication. The forums, which take place in 518 villages, are one of the few settings where citizens and the police can talk candidly about crime issues that [...]

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The industrial zone of Ashulia, just outside of Bangladesh’s sprawling capital, Dhaka, grabbed headlines in mid-June when hundreds of garment workers demanding higher minimum wages shut down over 300 factories. It was the most violent protests the region had experienced since 2010…

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In Bangladesh, the garment industry drives the country’s economic growth, contributing to an impressive 6 percent growth rate for nearly a decade. Bangladesh is now one of the world’s leading clothing exporters, second only to China…

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From September 9-19, The Asia Foundation hosts development pioneer Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC, the largest nongovernmental development organization in the world. Based in Bangladesh, and dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the poor…

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My colleague Michelle Chang recently blogged about the promises of mobile money for Asia. It’s true that in many countries, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where banking infrastructure is limited, mobile money represents a potential solution for the hundreds of millions of individuals who remain unbanked…

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At the opening day of the South Asia Women Parliamentarians’ Conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Dr. Miria Matembe, former member of parliament from Uganda, voiced an increasingly common theme: “The issue of women’s participation in politics is no longer in contention. What is central to the debate now is how to make their participation effective enough to influence the governance agenda and make it responsive to women’s interests, needs, and concerns.” But, despite what seems like a growing consensus around this idea, still just 19.5 percent of the world’s parliamentarians are women.

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Headlines would have us believe that women’s political participation is flourishing in Bangladesh due to their key positions in government: the prime minister and leader of the opposition are both women who, collectively, have ruled back and forth for more than 20 years.

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