Sharifa Khatun, a 65-year-old widow, wept openly on Wednesday morning when the news reached her slum by the roadside in Dhaka’s Khilgaon area. Begum Khaleda Zia, she was told, had died in the ICU of Evercare Hospital shortly before the Fajr prayer.

“In 2001, when Begum Khaleda Zia was in power, our lives were better than today,” Sharifa said, wiping her eyes. “She brought programmes for poor villagers that helped us survive, at least hand to mouth.”

Sharifa’s grief is intensely personal, but it echoes a wider national moment. Khaleda Zia’s death has reopened a long, unresolved debate about her political life. Yet among the poor—especially women—her memory is often framed less by high politics than by livelihoods, opportunity and dignity.

For many like Sharifa, Khaleda Zia’s name is tied to a period when economic policy appeared to work its way downwards.

A shift away from state control

When Khaleda Zia first assumed office in 1991, Bangladesh was still emerging from the ideological legacy of post-independence nationalisation. State dominance, weak financial institutions and chronic inefficiency had earned the country the derisive label of a “bottomless basket”.

Global winds were changing, and Khaleda Zia seized the moment. Her governments accelerated Bangladesh’s transition towards a market-oriented economy, reducing state monopolies, liberalising trade and placing the private sector at the centre of growth. Import restrictions were eased, tariffs rationalised and space created for domestic entrepreneurs and foreign investment.

This was not a dramatic overnight transformation, but it proved decisive. Market economics, once politically contested, became institutionalised as a cross-party consensus—one of her most enduring legacies.

Banking reform and financial access

Bangladesh’s banking sector in the early 1990s was riddled with political lending, poor supervision and ballooning defaults. Under Khaleda Zia, the government launched the Financial Sector Reform Programme with support from the World Bank and IMF. Bangladesh Bank’s supervisory authority was strengthened, prudential regulations introduced and loan classification standards enforced for the first time.

State-owned banks were only partially restructured, but private commercial banks expanded rapidly, increasing competition and widening access to credit. For small entrepreneurs and rural borrowers—especially women—this shift mattered.

Low-interest loans and microcredit schemes, largely channelled through NGOs with state backing, allowed millions of women to step into income-generating activities. “That was the first time we stood on our own feet,” Sharifa recalled.

Markets, mobiles and momentum

Khaleda Zia’s economic vision also extended to capital markets and connectivity. Her governments backed the expansion of the Dhaka Stock Exchange, strengthened the Securities and Exchange Commission and encouraged private companies to list. While later volatility exposed regulatory weaknesses, the capital market was pulled from the margins into the mainstream.

Perhaps more transformative was her early embrace of mobile connectivity. The introduction of mobile telephony—initially through Citycell and later competitors—laid foundations for financial inclusion long before “digital Bangladesh” became a slogan. Access to phones connected farmers to markets, families to remittances and women to informal financial networks that would later underpin mobile financial services.

Growth with stability

During Khaleda Zia’s two terms, Bangladesh recorded moderate but steady GDP growth. Inflation remained controlled, foreign exchange reserves stable and exports—particularly garments—expanded. Rural roads, bridges and basic infrastructure improved, knitting villages more closely into the national economy.

By today’s standards the growth rates appear modest, but they were achieved without major macroeconomic shocks. Fiscal discipline, even amid fierce political confrontation, became a defining feature of her economic stewardship.

Welfare alongside liberalisation

Crucially, Khaleda Zia did not pursue liberalisation in isolation. She believed democracy was hollow if it failed to serve the people. Her governments expanded social safety-net programmes such as food-for-work and vulnerable group feeding, and led large-scale relief and rehabilitation efforts during floods and cyclones in the 1990s and early 2000s.

As Bangladesh’s first woman prime minister, she also became a powerful symbol of women’s participation in public life. Female education, women’s employment and microcredit access received political backing, helping align growth with social inclusion.

This blend of market economics and targeted welfare contributed to gradual poverty reduction while keeping growth priorities intact.

A contested but lasting legacy

Khaleda Zia’s economic record remains debated. Critics argue reforms were incomplete and institutions left fragile. Supporters counter that her achievement lay not in radical transformation, but in consolidation—embedding open markets, financial reform and private-sector-led growth into Bangladesh’s development DNA.

What is beyond dispute is that she helped move the country decisively away from the paralysis of the past.

As news of her death spread, it was not policy papers that moved Sharifa Khatun to tears, but memory. “Those days,” she said softly, “we felt the state had not forgotten us.”

In the end, that may be the quietest measure of Khaleda Zia’s economic legacy: not where Bangladesh stands today, but how many of its poorest citizens once felt they had a place in its journey forward.