Bangladesh is still lagging behind the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in some areas including employment generation and adult literacy rate, a government report has said.
The country, however, has done well in some other areas like poverty alleviation, primary school enrolment and reduction of child mortality rates, said the latest MDG progress report of the government.
The General Economics Division (GED) of the Planning Commission has prepared the MDG progress report 2013.
The MDG progress report recorded the country's employment rate for the 15+ years population at 59.3 per cent of the total population although Bangladesh needs to create jobs for all by 2015, the terminal year of the MDGs.
The adult literacy rate (15+ years population) is also at a lower level as only 58.5 per cent of the total population are literate. According to the MDG target, the country needs to make all its population literate by 2015.
The report said the country is still falling short of the target for checking primary school level (Grade-IV) dropout rate at 3.60 per cent.
"A large part of the physically and mentally-retarded children remains out of the schooling system. Improvement of quality of education is also a challenge at the primary and higher levels that need to be taken care of on priority basis," the report said.
Chief of the GED Professor Shamsul Alam told the FE that if the OECD countries honoured their promise of disbursing 0.7 per cent of their Gross National Income (GNI) for the poor nations, Bangladesh could make more progress than what it had achieved.
Bangladesh has made a remarkable progress in alleviating poverty as its poverty rate declined to 26.2 per cent until last year 2013. According to MDG target, Bangladesh needs to cut its poverty rate to 29 per cent by 2015.
The MDG progress report said Bangladesh has already met several targets of the MDGs including reducing headcount poverty and poverty gap ratio, attaining gender parity at primary and secondary education, under-five mortality rate reduction, enrolment at primary schools, lowering infant mortality rate and maternal mortality ratio, improving immunisation coverage and reducing the incidence of communicable diseases.
On the other hand, areas in need of greater attention are hunger-poverty reduction and employment generation, increase in primary school completion and adult literacy rates, creation of decent wage employment for women, increase in presence of skilled health professionals at delivery, increased correct and comprehensive knowledge on HIV/AIDS, rise in forest coverage, and coverage of Information and Communication Technology, it said.
The report said unemployment as well as underemployment is especially dominant among the young people between 15 to 24 years of age. This age group comprises nearly 18.6 per cent of the country's population and 23.3 per cent of the labour force.
"While Bangladesh has demonstrated its capacity for achieving the goal of poverty reduction within the target timeframe, attaining food security and nutritional wellbeing still remains a challenge," it said.
The challenges with regard to reducing income inequality and the low economic participation of women also remain major concerns, it added.
However, wage employment for women in Bangladesh is still low. Only one woman out of every five is engaged in wage employment in non-agricultural sector.
The report said challenges remain in the areas of access to reproductive health and to safe water for all, as arsenic and salinity intrusion as a consequence of climate change fallout will exacerbate availability of safe water, especially for the poor.
