Bangladesh has also been one of the success stories, transforming itself from one of the poorest counties in the world to a lower-middle-income country in 40 years. The garment industry in Bangladesh has been the driving force behind its success. It has contributed to higher per-capita income and helped improve social development, especially gender empowerment. Bangladesh is now the world's second-largest exporter of readymade garments behind China. However, there are still significant challenges faced by the garment industry in terms of unsafe working conditions, low wages, and child labor. In this context, this project intends to investigate the following questions:

1) What were the reasons behind the rapid growth of the readymade garment sector in Bangladesh, and how did it outperform its colonial cousins India and Pakistan.

2) How did it contribute to social development and gender equality?

2) What are its critical current challenges, and how best to overcome them?

This project will be executed using secondary data and as such the two major contributions needed from the student at the initial stage are collecting secondary data and doing a literature survey. The secondary data will be collected from various sources and transformed into a spreadsheet [preferably MS Excel] to make those available for statistical analysis.

Possible time commitments required from the student are:

Data gathering – 20 hours

Data processing and manipulation – 15 hours

Literature Search – 15 hours

Preparation of an annotated bibliography – 15 hours

Computing simple descriptive statistics and developing graphs – 15 hours

At present, the plan is to meet for one hour remotely each week. This could be reviewed once the project starts. Students will be provided clear instructions on from where and how to download and organize data as well as conduct the the literature survey.