As a leader in worldwide apparel production, Bangladesh provides jobs for more than 4 million workers. With a workforce of this scale, the ready-made garment sector has a huge responsibility to ensure the health, safety and security across production facilities.
Bangladesh’s garment sector has long been under pressure to improve labor conditions, safety standards and overall social compliance. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse marked a turning point, exposing severe deficiencies in building safety and regulatory enforcement. In the years that followed, industry-wide initiatives helped catalyze meaningful reforms. More recently, the country has faced significant political upheaval as well as competitive challenges stemming from a change in U.S. trade policy, all of which has put its ready made garments industry under pressure.
Today, the facility-based social compliance certification organization WRAP finds Bangladesh in a moment of both progress and complexity.
WRAP spotlights this dichotomy in “Bangladesh: Overview of Social Compliance,” a report prepared exclusively for HGI. On one hand, audit data shows measurable improvement: the rate of corrective action plans (CAPs)—issued when facilities fall short of compliance standards—declined from approximately 56% of audits in 2024 to 46% in 2025. On the other hand, Bangladesh continues to underperform relative to global benchmarks.
WRAP uses 12 principles to assess the working conditions in production facilities around the world as they relate to things like forced labor, child labor and working hours as well as health and safety. During annual audits, participating facilities receive either a recommendation for certification or a corrective action plan aligned with each criterion.
In this report, WRAP highlights the top principles resulting in non-compliance in Bangladesh as well as the categories in most need of remediation.
At 44%, Principle 8, health and safety, leads the list. The top categories under this principle that prompted corrective action plans were failure to wear PPE, missing or inadequate machine safety guards, and restricted access to emergency exits.
Twenty-nine percent of all non-compliances in Bangladesh in 2025 fell under Principle 12: Security. These reflect violations related to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) requirements that address supply chain safety. In this case, the main issue was found to be seal verification, which often reflect incomplete or inaccurate recordkeeping and lack of CBP regulation training.
Principle 6, hours of work, generated 13% of non-compliance incidences in Bangladesh due to facilities exceeding the daily and weekly overtime limits for the country. This is a predictable outcome when supply chains come under pressure to perform and compete.
For each principle and category, WRAP outlined strategies for moving toward long-term improvement.
Ultimately, WRAP acknowledged Bangladesh’s commitment to compliance, which has resulted in “measurable progress,” but it noted the country needs to be more proactive in addressing the root cause of recurring non-compliance.
Download the report here for detail findings and suggestions for improvement.
