Handicrafts are unique expressions representing a particular culture or community through artisans and materials. Handicrafts are part of a much larger home accessory market, which includes handcrafted and machine-made goods. Handicrafts are mostly defined as items made by hand often with the use of simple tools and are generally artistic and traditional in nature. Handicrafts are made from raw materials and can be produced in unlimited numbers. Such products can be utilitarian, aesthetic, artistic, creative, culturally attached, decorative, functional, traditional, religiously and socially symbolic and significant. The handicrafts sector assumes significance due to various reasons such as low capital investment, high ration of value addition, robust potential for export and also foreign exchange earnings.

Importance of Handicrafts Sector in Bangladesh

The importance of Handicraft sector in Bangladesh cannot be traced back to any particular point of time. Being a home-based industry, it requires minimum overhead expenses and infrastructure to establish and operate. So, it can create jobs at low cost and high employment potentials in relation to capital employed. For the same reason, it tends to have high output to investment ratio. Handicrafts are often being located in the rural areas as dominantly home based pursuits involve large scale employment of women and thus help empowerment of weaker sections of the society. As a labour intensive, cottage based and rural and small township centred industry, handicraft industry becomes major source of income of both regular and off-season employment for all the rural communities. It will improve the standard of living of poor people and broader economic growth through improvement of rich traditional skills.

Challenges and Opportunities of Handicraft in Bangladesh

Handicrafts business is related to the accumulation of handmade product from over the country and to sell them in retail or wholesale. People have a great passion for this type of product because it contains flavour of culture and it has a variety of design. The challenges and opportunities of the Handicraft Product can help us to determine the current situation of our services. Challenges and gaps between demand and supply, source of raw materials and man power, potentiality of employment, and its prospect for future. Bangladesh is a developing and overpopulated country; thus, labour intensive technology can be more appreciable than capital intensive technology. Application of a large amount of low compensated workers to produce handicraft product will be beneficial for us from dual aspects. The first one is reduction in un-employment thus poverty alleviation and the second one is the earning of handsome amount of remuneration.

SDRS’s Steps in this sector

In order to create employment opportunity for the women, the organization undertook an important project Handicrafts. SDRS initiate Handicraft project in 2007 after getting the approval from the authority Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF) in 2009. Since then SDRS became a partner organisation (PO) of PKSF. With the assistance of PKSF, SDRS provides many effective trainings and supports to the women who lives in the remote area. SDRS successfully trained almost 3,520 deprived women. Later on, SDRS also affiliated as a partner organization of Grameen Telecom Trust (GTT) through Handicrafts project. They made different types of handicraft product such as Omanian Cap, Nakshi Katha, Panjabi, Bed Sheet, Sharee and Show Pieces which organization marketed as well as even exported to different countries such as Oman, Canada etc. throughout the world. Currently, SDRS has 02 big outlets at Gaibandha town and Rangpur city for selling of handicraft products.

Finally, we can say that in spite of having some challenges in handicrafts services, it is a potential sector. The importance of Handicraft sector in Bangladesh cannot be traced back to any particular point of time. SDRS is planning to involve more rural unemployed marginal people making self-dependent and ensuring job opportunity as well.