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Equitable futures depend upon better employment outcomes for young women. We use a skills ecosystems approach to explore how youth skills development programs can maximise their impact in highly gendered societies and labour markets. While improving employment outcomes and incomes for young women, BRAC's STAR program cannot withstand Bangladesh's deep-rooted and socially restrictive norms and practices. Short-term successes are diluted as family pressures and commitments take precedent over young women's economic lives. Adding a temporal dimension to the concept of skills ecosystems, these findings highlight that maintaining these impacts requires constant renegotiation and advocacy to challenge the structural obstacles within households and labour markets and within national policies and investments that constrain their longer-term economic empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development programmes centred on microfinance have experienced varied levels of success, especially in Bangladesh. Although impact assessments of these development interventions conclude that poor participants' access to credit is enhanced, the same empirical analysis reveals less encouraging results on women's empowerment and community transformation. Food for the Hungry's Family and Community Transformation (FCT) programme represents an alternative model to the traditional microcredit approach to development by emphasising internal savings, holistic training, and the build-up of community-wide social capital. Group graduation to sustainable independence takes a joint commitment of up to ten years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]