The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and UN Women Bangladesh, with support from the global women count programme and technical assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), on Wednesday launched the country’s official Household Production Satellite Account (HPSA). This HPSA measures the economic value of unpaid household and care work in Bangladesh, said a press release.
Unpaid domestic and care work—such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, household management, and caring for children, older persons, persons with disabilities, and those with health conditions—is a critical yet invisible driver of the economy. Women perform the vast majority of these tasks, which are essential but excluded from conventional economic statistics.
The launch follows a landmark policy commitment in the national budget (2025–26), where the Interim Government pledged to include women’s unpaid labour in national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) calculations.
Drawing on the Time Use Survey 2021 and the Labour Force Survey 2022, the HPSA estimates that unpaid household and care work contributed BDT 6.7 trillion in 2021, equal to 18.9 per cent of GDP. Women accounted for 85 per cent of this contribution.