Attaining MDGs: Quality of education needs to be improved

The lack of diversity in Bangladesh's food crop sector poses a challenge and more emphasis on the production of non cereal crops, such as pulses, fruits, and vegetables is needed. Crop diversification strategies should be demand-driven for success and sustainability. Protein and micronutrient deficient diets have serious implications for both maternal and child malnutrition. Intergenerational malnutrition dynamics whereby undernourished mothers give birth to underweight children or raise undernourished children, is a major hurdle to reducing hunger. Ensuring proper targeting and delivery of assistance to intended beneficiaries, continues to remain as major problem for both food and cash based social safety net programmes.
Ensuring food security to different groups of the poor such as moderate poor, extreme poor and potential 'climate refugees' during sudden increase in food prices continues to be a challenge. One of the important challenges in the MDG 1 is the pace of reduction of prevalence of underweight children under 5 years of age.
According to the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS)-2011, at the national level, 41 per cent of children under age five were stunted (low height for age), and overall, 15.6 per cent of children in Bangladesh were wasted (low weight for height). It was generally hypothesised that the reduction of poverty will enhance the nutritional status of a country. However, the multi-sectoral dimensions of nutrition requires different levels of interventions like behaviour change communication, information education and training, inter-sectoral approach along with the economic development. Hence, the nutrition might be an important issue in the Post-2015 Development Agenda. International comparison on prevalence of underweight children under-five years of age are shown in Table 2.  
STATUS OF MDG 2:  Significant progress has been made in increasing equitable access in education in 2013 (NER: 97.3 per cent; girls: 98.2 per cent, boys: 96.2 per cent), reduction of dropouts, improvement in completion of the cycle, and implementation of a number of quality enhancement measures in primary education. Initiatives have been taken to introduce pre-school education to prepare the children for formal schooling. The primary school grade 5 survival rate in 2013 was 80.5 per cent which indicates a modest increase from 43 per cent recorded in 1991.

 The government is in the process of implementing a comprehensive National Education Policy (2010) to achieve its objectives. The Constitution of Bangladesh has provision for free and compulsory primary education. The faster and relatively consistent growth in girls' enrolment vis-à-vis boys has been an important driver of the observed improvement in Net Enrolment Ratio (NER).
Focused and substantive initiatives undertaken by the government such as distribution of free textbooks among students up to the secondary level, providing scholarship to female students up to the higher secondary level, holding public examinations and announcing results within the stipulated time and creation of the Education Assistance Trust Fund for the poor and meritorious students, food for education, stipends for primary school children, media outreach, and community or satellite schools have all helped in boosting the NER.
The government has been working to improve the quality of education alongside increasing literacy rate to build an illiteracy-free Bangladesh by 2014. It is observed that significant contribution of important factors, such as improved economy, decreased unemployment, decreased mortality rate and decreased hunger have made it possible for doing better in attaining the primary education targets of MDGs in Bangladesh.  
According to the 2013 UN MDGs report, developing regions have made impressive strides in expanding access to primary education, with the adjusted net enrolment rate growing from 83 per cent in 2000 to 90 per cent in 2011. Over the same period, the number of children out of school worldwide declined by almost half (from 102 million to 57 million). Considerable progress has also has been made in South Asia (increased from 78 per cent to 93 per cent between 2000 and 2011) one third of students enrolled in the first grade will leave school before reaching the last grade. The international comparison of Bangladesh with respect to primary school completion rates among its neighbouring countries are shown in Table 3. Efforts should also be taken to attain cent per cent attainment of school completion rate to achieve more socio-economic progress.

Making required progress in the survival rate to grade 5 poses a big challenge in achieving MDG 2. The trend growth rate for primary cycle survival at present is considerably below the warranted rate for achieving the 100 per cent target. In this context, high repetition and dropout rates pose serious challenges for accelerating progress in survival to the last grade. On average, 8.6 years of pupil inputs are required to produce a 5-year primary school graduate. Improvement in the learning environment and learning achievement of children is imperative to retain children in school until the last grade of primary education.  
Despite a dearth of comprehensive information on education quality, experts widely agree that the quality of education needs to be appreciably improved for the vast majority of the primary school children. While it is true that Bangladesh has managed to achieve high enrolment rate at a low cost, there is a link between the quality of education and investment in the education sector. Bangladesh has so far not been able to invest more than 2.5 per cent of its GDP in education. Ensuring meaningful and quality life-long learning for adolescents and the adult population has always been a challenge in the country.
Poor quality adult literacy programmes discourage sustained participation of adults in literacy and ongoing adult education programmes. Limited staff development opportunities and low compensation provide little incentives for sustained quality teaching. Extreme poverty, marginal population groups, special need children, child labour, hard to reach areas, natural disaster such as cyclone and floods are several major hindrances for achieving the NER target.

STATUS OF MDG 3: Bangladesh has already achieved gender parity in primary and secondary education at the national level. Since 1990, the primary school enrolment has increased from 12.00 million in 1990 (with 6.6 million boys and 5.4 million girls) to 19.58 million in 2013, half of whom are girls. Since 1991, the enrolment of female students in secondary education has increased significantly with girls' enrolment surpassing boys' in 2000 (52 per cent for girls and 48 per cent for boys). Women participation in the decision-making process has also marked significant improvement in the country. There has been a sharp increase in the number of women parliamentarians elected (20 per cent of total seats) in 2014. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2013, Bangladesh ranks 75th out of 133 with overall score of 0.6848. Its rank was, however, 86th out of 135 countries with an overall score of 0.668 in 2012.
This positive development has occurred due to some specific public interventions focusing on girl students, such as stipends and exemption of tuition fees for girls in rural areas, and the stipend scheme for girls at the secondary level. This has contributed to promoting the objectives of ensuring gender equality and empowerment of women. There has been a steady improvement in the social and political empowerment scenario of women in Bangladesh. The government has adopted the National Policy for Women's Advancement 2011 and a series of programmes for empowerment of women.
According to the 2013 UN MDGs report, in developing regions overall, the gender parity index at each level of education is close to or in the range of 0.97 and 1.03, the measure or parity. Gender disparities become more marked in secondary education (South Asia, from 0.59 to 0.92 between 1990 and 2011). The international comparison of Bangladesh with respect to gender parity among its neighbouring countries is shown in Table 4. Concerted efforts have to be taken to attain gender parity at tertiary level in Bangladesh.  
The national-level primary enrolment shows that Bangladesh has achieved gender parity in 2005. However, regional variation in terms of primary enrolment exists; Barisal is yet to achieve desired position while negative growth exists for Rajshahi and Khulna.
Increased enrolment of girls at secondary schools has been a significant achievement in Bangladesh. The challenge is to sustain the twin objectives of keeping increasing number of girl students at secondary schools and retain them until graduation. Despite many improvements in primary and secondary school enrolments, considerable disparity exists between male and female literacy rates.
The challenge is to narrow the gap through intensive public and private initiatives. Absence of bridging between formal and non-formal education and lack of opportunities for technical and vocational education for the disadvantaged women are barriers to meaningful and quality life-long learning, and thus participation in formal workforce. The challenge is to involve women more in productive income generating work to ensure improvement in their livelihood.
Prof. Shamsul Alam is Member, General Economics Division (GED), Bangladesh Planning Commission.
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