Bangladesh Women's National Team History

Bangladesh's women played their first international matches in July 2007, against Thailand, and won both. Within a month they had won the Asian Cricket Council's women's tournament. It was cricket at a level almost nobody outside the participating boards was watching, played by cricketers who in most cases had learned the game without a coach, and it is where the record starts.

Nineteen years later the side has one continental title that no other team except India has ever won, a place in two fifty-over World Cups, permanent Test status it has never used, and a home-conditions method built almost entirely on spin. It also has a losing record in both international formats and a persistent difficulty converting good bowling performances into won matches. Both halves of that are the history.

What follows is the chronology, with the qualifying tournaments included, because in the women's game those are frequently the matches that decide a decade.

Getting on the map, 2007 to 2011

The 2007 tournament win mattered administratively rather than sportingly. It established Bangladesh at the top of the second tier of Asian women's cricket and it gave the board a reason to keep funding a programme.

The decisive moment came four years later at the World Cup Qualifier. On 24 November 2011 Bangladesh beat the United States by nine wickets, a result that guaranteed them a finish high enough in the tournament to be granted one-day international status. Two days later, on 26 November, they played their first official ODI, against Ireland, and won it by 82 runs. Their first Twenty20 international followed on 28 August 2012, again against Ireland.

That sequence explains something about how the side developed. Bangladesh's women were granted status by winning matches against the other emerging teams, not by beating the established ones, and the gap between those two standards took another decade to begin closing.

It also set the pattern for how the team has been resourced. Status brought fixtures, fixtures brought a small budget, and the budget was spent on the national squad rather than on the layers beneath it. For most of the 2010s Bangladesh fielded an international team without anything that could reasonably be called a development system behind it, which is why the same names recur across so many years of scorecards.

The captains, and what each inherited

Captaincy has passed between a small group of long-serving players, and each handover marks a phase of the side's development rather than a change of tactics.

Jahanara Alam, a seam bowler, led the team in the middle of the 2010s. Salma Khatun captained in the twenty-over format through the 2018 Asia Cup, the side's defining result, while Rumana Ahmed held the one-day captaincy in the same period — a split arrangement that reflected how thinly the squad's leadership was spread. In late 2021 Nigar Sultana Joty took over from Rumana across formats, and has led through the 2022 and 2025 World Cup campaigns and the tours that followed.

The stability under Joty is itself notable. Bangladesh's men's side has changed captain repeatedly over the same period; the women's team has had one leader through an entire World Cup cycle, largely because the alternatives with comparable international experience are few.

The 2014 tournament at home

Hosting the ICC Women's World Twenty20 in 2014 gave Bangladesh automatic qualification and their first appearance at a global event. They won two of their five group matches and did not progress.

The significance was elsewhere. It was the first time a Bangladeshi women's team played in front of a domestic television audience, at the grounds the men use, including Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium. A women's fixture at a major venue stopped being a novelty in that fortnight, which is a small thing that later mattered a great deal in arguments about scheduling and pay inside the board's committee structure.

Malaysia, 2018

The 2018 Women's Twenty20 Asia Cup in Malaysia is the high point of the record and remains the only major multi-nation title won by any Bangladeshi representative team.

Bangladesh won four of their five group matches and then beat India in the final. India had won every previous edition of the competition; Bangladesh became the first side to take it from them. Salma Khatun captained, and the squad was drawn overwhelmingly from players who had come through before the domestic game had any settled shape, a point developed in the guide to women's cricket in Bangladesh.

The result also changed how the men's side's near-misses in the same competition were discussed at home. Bangladesh had lost Asia Cup finals in both fifty-over and twenty-over formats, a pattern set out in the guide to Bangladesh's Asia Cup finals, and after June 2018 the women had a trophy the men did not.

Test status without a Test

In April 2021 the ICC granted permanent Test and one-day status to the women's teams of all full member countries. Bangladesh has therefore been entitled to play Test cricket for five years and has not played a Test.

There is no mystery about why. A five-day match requires an opponent willing to schedule it, a squad with multi-day experience, and a board prepared to fund a fixture with no broadcast value. Bangladesh had none of the three in 2021. The board has since built a multi-day domestic competition, described in the guide to Bangladesh women's domestic cricket, which is the necessary first step rather than a sufficient one.

The 2022 World Cup, reached by ranking

Bangladesh's first appearance at a fifty-over World Cup came in 2022, and they qualified without playing the deciding matches: the qualifying tournament in Zimbabwe was abandoned during the group stage because of pandemic travel restrictions, and places were allocated on one-day ranking. Bangladesh's ranking was high enough.

At the tournament they finished seventh, winning one match, against Pakistan. A single win in seven is a bad return, and the batting was the reason: the side repeatedly bowled well enough to make a modest total defensible and then failed to reach one.

Global event	Outcome	Notes
2014 ICC Women's World Twenty20	Group stage	Hosts, two wins from five
2018 Women's T20 Asia Cup	Champions	Beat India in the final in Malaysia
2022 Women's Cricket World Cup	Seventh	Debut; one win, over Pakistan
2024 Women's T20 World Cup	Group stage	Hosting moved to the UAE; beat Scotland
2025 Women's Cricket World Cup	Group stage	Beat Pakistan; no semi-final place

The 2024 tournament that left the country

Bangladesh were awarded the 2024 ICC Women's T20 World Cup and lost it. Political unrest in the country during 2024 caused the ICC to relocate the tournament to the United Arab Emirates, keeping Bangladesh as the nominal host nation.

For the players it was the second time in a decade that a home global event had shaped their year, and this time the home advantage evaporated. They beat Scotland — their first win at a T20 World Cup since the 2014 tournament — and went out in the group stage. Losing the hosting also cost the women's game the domestic exposure that 2014 had generated, which was the argument most often made in Dhaka about why the relocation mattered beyond logistics.

Lahore, and a second World Cup

The 2025 World Cup Qualifier is the best sustained cricket the side has played. Bangladesh finished second in the tournament with three wins and two defeats, going through ahead of the West Indies on net run rate — the sort of margin that decides careers. Along the way they posted 276 for six against Scotland at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore on 15 April 2025, their highest total in one-day internationals, with Nigar Sultana making 83 from 59 balls and half-centuries from Fargana Hoque and Sharmin Akhter; Nahida Akter then took four wickets as Scotland fell 34 short.

The margin of qualification bears repeating because it is so small. Bangladesh went through ahead of the West Indies on a net run rate difference of a little over one hundredth of a run per over. A single boundary conceded in any of five matches, in any of those innings, and the side would have missed a World Cup and the revenue and profile that came with it.

At the World Cup itself, staged from late September to early November 2025, Bangladesh beat Pakistan by seven wickets on 2 October, chasing a small target inside 32 overs. They lost to England by four wickets at Guwahati, a match they were in for most of its length, and did not reach the semi-finals. That is a familiar summary of a Bangladeshi campaign: competitive in more matches than the results table suggests, decisive in very few.

The players the record rests on

Bangladesh's international record is unusually lopsided between departments, and the fastest way to understand the side is to look at the bowling first.

The bowlers who hold it together

Bangladesh's international record is a bowling record. The batting has produced one landmark and a small number of substantial innings; the bowling has produced almost everything else.

• Nahida Akter, a left-arm spinner, is the side's leading wicket-taker in Twenty20 internationals and among the leaders in one-day cricket. Her five for 12 against Kenya in January 2022 is the best T20I return by a Bangladeshi.
• Khadija Tul Kubra's six for 20 against Pakistan on 8 October 2018 remains the best bowling figures by a Bangladeshi woman in a one-day international.
• Salma Khatun, off-spinner and long-serving captain, and Rumana Ahmed, a leg-spinner who also batted in the middle order, were the attack that won the 2018 Asia Cup.
• Marufa Akter is the exception to the pattern, a genuinely quick bowler in a side built on slow ones.

The bias towards spin is not an accident of selection. It reflects the surfaces Bangladeshi cricketers grow up on, the coaching available, and the fact that a spinner who bowls accurately can be effective at international level earlier than a fast bowler can. The men's game has the same tilt, examined in the guides to Bangladesh's spin bowling tradition and specifically to left-arm spin.

The batting landmarks

Two innings define the batting record. Fargana Hoque's 107 against India at Mirpur on 22 July 2023 was the first century by a Bangladeshi woman in a one-day international and remains the highest; the match itself was tied and the series drawn, and she took the player-of-the-series award. Nigar Sultana Joty's unbeaten 113 against the Maldives on 5 December 2019, in a Bangladesh total of 255 for two, is the highest score by a Bangladeshi woman in a Twenty20 international.

Nigar has since become the side's captain and its most consistent batter across both white-ball formats. The gap between her output and the rest of the order is the clearest single indicator of what the domestic structure still fails to supply.

Other honours, and what the next cycle asks

Away from ICC events the side has a respectable collection. Bangladesh have won the T20 World Cup Qualifier several times, took gold at the 2019 South Asian Games, and have medalled at the Asian Games. Those are second-tier competitions, but they are the ones that keep a programme funded and a squad playing.

The immediate context is the 2025-29 ICC Women's Championship cycle, which commits Bangladesh to a regular programme of bilateral one-day series against the other leading nations. That removes the old excuse of a thin fixture list and replaces it with a harder test: the side will be measured over four years against opponents who play more cricket and pay their players more. The board's response has been to expand the domestic calendar and the contract pool, on the reasoning set out in the guide to how women's cricket has grown.

Nothing about the record so far suggests Bangladesh will move quickly up the fifty-over table, and the honest projection is incremental. The counter-evidence is 2018, when a side with almost no structure behind it beat the best team in Asia in a final. For the men's parallel story see the history of Bangladesh cricket, for the global tournaments the fifty-over World Cup and T20 World Cup pages, and for the rest of the Bangladeshi game the cricket in Bangladesh hub.

Sources and method

This history is built from ICC tournament records and media releases for the World Cups, T20 World Cups and qualifying events, Asian Cricket Council records for the Asia Cup, and Bangladesh Cricket Board announcements for squads, captaincy and status changes. Individual bests and landmark innings were checked against published scorecards for the matches named. Career aggregates and win-loss totals move with every series and are deliberately not stated as fixed numbers here. The page is descriptive; none of the figures are computed from our own datasets.