Bangladesh's garment industry draws workers from rural districts across the country into a handful of dense industrial zones — Dhaka, Gazipur, Narayanganj, Chattogram, and Savar among them. That migration, while economically essential, regularly leaves workers in an administrative gap: registered to vote, if at all, in a home district they may rarely visit, while having no formal voting presence where they actually live and work.
Why this matters
A worker who cannot vote where she lives has little formal leverage over the local decisions that most directly affect her — housing conditions, transport, local policing, and council representation. For a workforce that is overwhelmingly female and already underrepresented in formal political structures, this gap compounds the broader pattern NUK works to address through its Women's Political Representation Program.
What the program does
- Registration drives — organising on-the-ground registration support near factory clusters, timed around national voter list update periods.
- Documentation assistance — helping workers navigate the paperwork and proof-of-residence requirements that migrant workers often struggle to produce.
- Civic education — plain-language information on the voter registration process, election timelines, and what local representation can and cannot do for workers.
- Coordination with factory management — working with employers to allow registration access without disrupting production schedules, an approach consistent with NUK's broader non-confrontational strategy in the RMG sector.
Part of a wider civic push
This work runs alongside NUK's research and advocacy on gender in governance more broadly, and connects directly to the organisation's longstanding presence inside the garment sector through its Garment Worker Support Program.