Runner-Up, Winner of MDGs Media Awards 2007, Print Category
Bangladesh is unlikely to achieve major targets of poverty alleviation in consistent with the UN Millennium Development Goals despite certain progress in economic development towards meeting a few goals, suggest the country’s development trends.
In attaining the first goal of halving poverty by 2015, Bangladesh’s task, as specified in a 2005 government-UN joint progress report, is to reduce the proportion of people living on one dollar a day from 49.6 per cent to 29.4 per cent during the period.
Bangladesh reduced poverty at a rate of 1.8 per cent a year in five years, said the recent household income and expenditure survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. But a 1.48 per cent growth rate for a population of 150 million people, according to the family planning directorate data, has slowed down the pace of poverty reduction.
Zohra Bewa is one of the helpless poor who has been struggling to earn a living and educating her two children. Living in a house spanning two decimals of land at Sudampara in Tangail, the 35-year-old widow earns Tk 40 (much less than a dollar) a day, but not regularly, by doing dirt-filling jobs.
Losing her rickshaw-puller husband three years back, Zohra can no longer bear the cost of education of her daughter Rozina, a student of Class VI. The girl does not also receive any government stipend because of procedural flaws that she even does not know of.
‘How long will my son Liton Miah, now in Class IV, keep going to school? He had better try to earn for the family,’ Zohra said. She cannot manage her family’s khoraki — a sociological term which is used to measure poverty as annual food rations.
Both her daughter and son are about to drop out of school, implying a defeat to the government’s aim of achieving 100 per cent completion of primary education and removal of gender disparity by 2015 as part of the UN goals.
Tired of her struggle, Zohra now no longer believes she would come out of the cycle of poverty in near future. Her story reflects a picture of vulnerability of the poor in society although the country has achieved economic growth of around 6 per cent in recent years.
A child plays among the debris of what used to be his house on the bank of the Buriganga in Dhaka which, along with thousand others, was demolished for being illegally set up. De facto protection against such eviction is one of the environmental indicators of the UN MDG.
— New Age photo
‘The government and international community should take extreme poverty much more seriously. We have to protect the people who do not benefit from the growth,’ David Wood, country representative of the UK Department for International Development, said at a workshop, on ‘Towards a strategy for achieving the MDG outcomes in Bangladesh’ in Dhaka in 2006.
Indicating the country’s position on track in school enrolment, a survey by the primary and mass education ministry a few years ago claimed the primary education completion rate was only 67 per cent.
However, one in every five children remains ‘non-literate’ or ‘semi-literate’ even after five years of schooling, found another survey styled ‘the education watch’ conducted by the Campaign for Popular Education, a coalition of non-government organisations working on education. The survey added one out of every five children cannot enrol on primary schooling while one in every three of them enrolled drops out before completing the five-year course.
‘Our challenges lie in addressing child malnutrition, maternal mortality and dropout from schools although the country has made a remarkable progress in coming out of various shackles of poverty compared with some of South Asian countries,’ Hossain Zillur Rahman, an eminent economist, told New Age.
The rate of stunted children in Bangladesh is around 40 per cent compared with about 45 per cent in India, 50 per cent in Nepal and about 32 per cent in Myanmar, said Helen Keller International report 2005. In 5-6 years, Bangladesh has also reduced mortality rate of children aged below five years from 151 to 82 per thousand, lower than 100 per thousand such deaths in Pakistan.
Describing Bangladesh’s maternal mortality rate, despite significant improvement, as one of the highest incidences in the world, a recent World Bank report titled ‘To the MDGs and Beyond’ forecast that a major impediment to the betterment of maternal health outcomes — the current state of public health services — would not allow the country to reach the target. Bangladesh’s target is to reduce maternal mortality to 143 by 2015 from 320-400 per 100,000 only a few years back.
‘NGOs should consider local governments to be key players in assuring accountability, particularly in complement to community groups with which most NGOs already work, and devise strategies for working closely with them,’ the WB report recommended.
Hossain Zillur, who works on poverty issues using the platform of the Power and Participation Research Centre, maintained that Bangladesh’s target should be ‘MDG-plus’ to bring dynamism into overall national efforts to fight out all ‘evils of poverty.’ Still, he explained, the country outperformed many countries in Africa and some in Asia in combating poverty syndromes, in spite of its ‘lacklustre’ performance in governance and overall productivity, cashing in on what he coined ‘personality revolution’ of independent citizenry.
In the analyses made by a number of government agencies and donors, remittances sent by 4.5 million expatriate Bangladeshis, keeping one million people under the government’s social safety net programmes and borrowing of micro-credit by 16 million poor, mostly women, are said to have played a significant role in combating poverty, especially in rural areas.
Yet, micro-credit has not been able to provide many with ‘graduation ladder’ to step towards the next stage of development by promoting more income-generating small and medium enterprises.
Mosammat Amisa, a 40-year-old woman at Ghagoa of the northern Gaibandha, has been a micro-credit recipient of the Grameen Bank for 20 years. ‘I sold out my cattle and have also taken loans from ASA [another micro-finance organisation] for paying back my earlier loans,’ she said. Morzina Begum of the same locality and another long-time borrower of the Grameen Bank, made her husband, Abu Bakr, a recipient of loans from the state-run Employment Bank to start a rice mill for their livelihood.
For the poor and backward groups of people staying far away from the capital, a fair marketing chain is yet to be established to properly facilitate buying and selling of commodities and services.
Mizanur Rahman is a poor farmer in a Rupsa village of the south-western Khulna, who can only live from hand to mouth by shrimp cultivation on a small piece of land. Shrimp exports to rich western market that fatten the country’s foreign exchange reserve did not help him to ‘send (his) poverty to museum’, a phrase often used by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. ‘I am leading the life of a poor labourer,’ the farmer made an account of his status.
Even a better-placed farmer there, Apurba Mallik, invested in 2006 Tk 100,000 in shrimp cultivation and sold shrimp worth around Tk 125,000. ‘Where is my profit after my family members and I put in our hard labour? The poor remain poor,’ he said and blamed the system of shrimp trading for creating rather a trap of poverty.
Bangladesh needs a per capita rural consumption growth of at least 4 per cent a year to achieve the UN goals, estimates the poverty reduction strategy paper — Unlocking the Potentials — the government’s document attuned to the UN goals. Currently, rural income grows at 2.2 per cent with a 1 per cent decline in poverty, shows the latest Bangladesh annual economic survey.
Poor and inadequate service delivery systems and institutions have been identified in a recent regional report as major obstacles to achieving the MDG in South Asian countries, including Bangladesh. The report titled ‘A Future Within Reach’ presented at the South Asia MDG Forum in Kathmandu, Nepal, in October 2006 observed that none of these countries were on track to fully meet the MDG by the given timeframe, notwithstanding certain progress with wide disparities between and within countries.
Jeffrey Sachs, the world famous economist and director of the UN Millennium Project, has reportedly stressed the need for two things — sustained partnerships between governments and civil society and sustained donor resource input — to attain the goals. ‘We can still achieve the Millennium Development Goals if proper use is made of the powerful tools at our disposal,’ he said during a visit to Nairobi, Kenya, in mid-January.
‘It’s only a philosophical truism that we need foreign aid to ensure adequate flow of resources and fund development projects aiming at attaining the MDG in Bangladesh context,’ said Aminul Islam Bhuiyan, the secretary of the Economic Relations Division, which deals with external assistance.
The Planning Commission’s General Economics Division, a bureaucratic focal point for assessing development goals, is yet to fix any date for reviewing the MDG attainments so far, in consultation with the Local Consultative Group, a forum of bilateral and multilateral donors and lenders.
Nevertheless, there is no political authority to comment on the latest state and necessary review of the country’s performance in attaining the UN goals since an interim administration is now in office with an elected government unlikely to take office in about next two years.
Khawaza Main Uddin is a special correspondent, New Age.
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