Building a Manifesto and Beyond: Creating Impact Through Feminist Research with Women in Bangladesh

In this article, the authors reflect on the power of participatory feminist research in supporting gendered knowledges and cultures of equality through a community-based education project working with women construction workers in Sylhet, northern Bangladesh. We consider the impacts of their involvement in feminist qualitative research conducted as part of the Global Gender & Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE) project, an international research, education and capacity building project funded through the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (2017–2022). We then explore what happened next, between 2022 and 2025, after the official project ended. GlobalGRACE aimed to enhance women’s wellbeing, support self-esteem and confidence building, and promote gender equality with women construction workers from socio-economically marginalised communities. Here we reflect on the ways participant women were able to bring their agency and situated gendered knowledges through their participation to create exhibitions of films and photography, build a Manifesto of Workers Rights, and emerge beyond the project as entrepreneurs, developing a lasting social enterprise supporting over 2800 women. Travelling through the GlobalGRACE project, we thus consider participant women’s experiences as they made this journey from day-labourers on building sites to creating Protity, a women’s social enterprise supporting one another to become independent entrepreneurs running their own small businesses in Sylhet, Bangladesh.