Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday urged both local and international entrepreneurs to take steps to ensure labour rights alongside creating more job opportunities.

She also urged them to take steps to improve workplace environment, increase the welfare of workers, their occupational health and safety, and employ more women and physically-challenged people.

Hasina made the request while inaugurating the Dhaka Summit on Skills, Employability, and Decent Work at Osmani Memorial Auditorium in Dhaka.

She hoped that development partners will increase their cooperation in improving the efficiency of workers, improving reliability and creating decent work environment as they did in the past.

Mentioning that achieving sustainable development goals or SDGs is a big challenge for Bangladesh, Hasina said increasing the supply of skilled manpower, creating new jobs and boosting earnings capacity will help Bangladesh alleviate poverty. "I firmly believe we'll also be successful in achieving SDGs with our united efforts." About exports, Hasina said: "We should diversify our products and expansion of market for our future economy and jobs." "Only incentives are not enough, we also need to invest more in capital and technology and human resource development."

Putting emphasis on the value addition of products, she said: "If we improve our garment products design and market those by ourselves with self-initiative, we'll be able add more value.” To create new jobs, Hasina said, her government has been working relentlessly with new initiatives to encourage trade facilitation, reducing the cost of capital, infrastructure and uninterrupted power supply.

There is no alternative to training to build skilled manpower, and her government had formulated National Skill Development Policy 2011 to coordinate all types of vocational and technical education.

Besides, the government has been implementing various programmes aimed at improving education and skills.

Hasina said technical and financial assistance from the International Labour Organisation and other development partners are playing a significant role in implementing the government's long-term technical and vocational education and training reform programmes.