Ministry unveils report on progress today
Bangladesh is still lagging behind in areas like hunger-poverty reduction, employment generation, primary school completion rate, adult literacy rate, income inequality and creation of decent wage employment for women in attaining the United Nations Millennium
Development Goals, said a report of the planning ministry.‘Though Bangladesh has demonstrated its capacity for achieving the goal of poverty reduction within the timeframe, attaining food security and nutritional wellbeing, reducing income inequality and low economic participation of women still remain as challenges and major concerns,’ the report titled ‘MDGs: Bangladesh Progress Report-2012’ stated.
General Economics Division of the planning ministry will unveil today the report at the National Economic Council auditorium in the capital.
The report says that wage employment for women in Bangladesh is still very low as only one woman out of every five is engaged in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector.
According to the report, Bangladesh also remains in challenges in areas of increasing in the presence of skilled health professionals at delivery, correct and comprehensive knowledge on HIV/AIDs and increase in coverage of information and communication technology.
Officials expressed apprehension that some of the MDGs targets might not be achieved by 2015 and said that these areas needed greater attention towards attaining the MDGs.
The report says Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in the areas of poverty reduction, reducing the prevalence of underweight children, increasing enrolment at primary schools, lowering the infant mortality rate and maternal mortality rate, improving immunisation coverage and reducing the incidence of communicable diseases.
The country has already met several targets of the MGDs like reducing poverty gap ratio, attaining gender parity in primary and secondary education, reduction of under-five mortality rate, it said.
‘Considering the poverty reduction trend in the country since 1992, it can be said that the MDGs target of halving the population living below the poverty line to 29 per cent is already achieved in 2012,’ the report said.
The report quoted the ‘Household Income and Expenditure Survey-2010’ which showed that the incidence of poverty was declining at a rate of 2.47 per cent per year since 1992 in the country against the MDG target of 2.12 per cent and poverty is declining from 56.6 per cent in 1991-92 to 31.5 per cent in 2010.
The report says that significant progress has been made in increasing equitable access in education, reduction of dropouts, and gender parity in primary and secondary enrolment but the challenges include attaining the targets of primary education completion rate and the adult literacy rate.
In 2000, United Nations declared MDGs, to be attained by 2015, adopting 8 goals, 18 targets and 48 indicators to measure progress towards the MDGs.
According to the report, income inequality between the rich and the poor is increasing in the country as the share of the poorest quintal (the bottom 20 per cent of the population ranked by income or consumption) in the national income fell to 5.22 per cent in 2010 from 5.26 per cent in 2005.
Appropriate interventions are required in this regard, it said.
The report also says that it will be difficult to achieve the target of employment for all by 2015 as only 59.3 per cent of the population over 15 years of age was economically active in 2010 while the participation of women remains quite low at 36 per cent.
-With New Age input
