Bangladesh once stood out as a development success story, celebrated for its laudable performance in lifting millions out of poverty. Today, that narrative is fast unravelling. For the first time in decades, poverty rates are climbing rather than falling. The irony is bitter: the economy is still growing, but the growth is not producing jobs or broad-based prosperity. Instead, it is deepening inequality, entrenching vulnerabilities and pushing families back into hardship.
This reversal was a stark message from a recent dialogue hosted by the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), which brought together some of the country's respected economists and policy thinkers. Their findings should disrupt any complacency in policymaking circles. Poverty, they warned, has risen by nearly 10 percentage points since 2022. One in four citizens is now poor. One in ten is trapped in extreme poverty. Another 18 per cent-the "vulnerable non-poor"-are barely hanging on just above the poverty line, exposed to every shock.
It is a grim picture. The core problem is obvious: Bangladesh is running an economic model that celebrates GDP expansion while ignoring the most basic measure of development-jobs.
The phrase "jobless growth" has long been dismissed by policymakers as academic jargon.
But the evidence is now undeniable. Despite a decade of robust GDP numbers, unemployment stands at 2.73 million, with youth unemployment and underemployment at crisis levels. More than 40 per cent of young people are classified as NEET-not in employment, education or training.
Growth has not been translated into employment. Worse, inequality has widened, slowing poverty reduction. If joblessness defines one side of the poverty reversal, broken education and health systems define the other. Around 15.5 per cent of children between five and 18 are not in school, largely because their families cannot afford it. With households covering about 70 per cent of education costs, poor families are being priced out of opportunity.
In the dialogue, PPRC Chairman Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman calls it "risk of generational poverty." Children denied schooling today are condemned to poor job or income prospects, creating a vicious cycle. When families cannot access health services or cope with chronic illness, the slide into debt and poverty accelerates.
The reversal is even more severe in rural Bangladesh. Agricultural growth is slowing, real wages for farm workers are eroding and rural non-farm income-a lifeline that accounts for 60 per cent of household earnings-is shrinking.
If the government truly wants to halt poverty, rural policy deserves urgent attention with a view to improving agricultural productivity, protecting workers' real wages, expanding rural employment, and pumping capital into the non-farm economy. Anything less will mean widening disparity between rural and urban Bangladesh.
What makes this reversal particularly damning is that it was avoidable. Private investment has been stuck at 23-24 per cent of GDP for over a decade, while foreign direct investment has limped along below 1.0 per cent. These stagnant figures tell the story of an economy unwilling to expand opportunity.
Meanwhile, the social protection system-the very safety net designed to catch the vulnerable-is fragmented, outdated, and shockingly inadequate. There are some 20 overlapping schemes, none of them delivering effectively.
Poverty reduction in Bangladesh has meant nudging people just above the line, without ensuring a sustainable escape. The result is a population always staying one crisis away from collapse. Covid-19, inflation, and political turmoil have only exposed how fragile the model really is.
The problem is not just economic-it is political. For years, successive governments have basked in the glow of GDP numbers, ignoring the cracks beneath. Poverty reduction is no longer at the centre of the reform agenda. Job creation is treated as a side effect, not the main goal. Education and health remain heavily privatised, forcing poor families to pay what they cannot afford.
The way forward is not difficult to discern. Experts laid it out with clarity:
• Put employment generation at the core of economic planning.
• Reinvest in public education and healthcare to break the intergenerational poverty trap.
• Address rural decline by supporting farm productivity and non-farm livelihoods.
• Overhaul social protection into a shock-responsive, inclusive and data-driven system.
• Remove bottlenecks to private and foreign investment to expand opportunities.
Above all, policymakers must abandon the illusion that GDP growth alone will carry the poor forward. It will not. Bangladesh must now confront the hard truth: poverty reduction has stalled because growth has been hollow. Bangladesh's poverty reduction journey was once built on bold choices-empowering women through microfinance, expanding primary education, leveraging garments for jobs.
Those choices worked because they were people-centric. The current reversal is a test of whether today's policymakers will take the bold steps needed to rescue millions from sliding back?
The answer will determine whether Bangladesh's future is one of shared prosperity-or widening exclusion embedded in jobless growth.
wasiahmed.bd@gmail.com