Investing in young people

The greatest achievement in Bangladesh in terms of population development has been made possible with the educational attainment of young Bangladeshi children, especially the young girls, during the last two decades. Successive governments since the early 1990s have devoted tremendous attention and resources to the well- being of young females particularly, especially for their primary and secondary education, by providing them with a variety of incentives like free tuitions and scholarships.
This social transformation took place at a time when in the rural areas of Bangladesh it was a social binding for girls to remain confined inside their homes for household work and a taboo for any girl to walk outside of home for any purpose, let alone education. Women in Bangladesh have all along been trapped in a vicious cycle of dependency, first as dependents under parents and later under husbands.
The second important contribution to the country's population development has been made by the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially by the Grameen Bank, in empowering the poor through self-esteem and self-employment. Females were mainly the target group and the World Bank, along with other international donor agencies, had played a pivotal role by financing a number of projects in this regard.
The positive changes that are now being found and felt in the societal developments of Bangladesh are undoubtedly the direct impact of those initiatives that were taken for educating the rural people, mainly our adolescent girls, and making them socially worthy and economically self-reliant.
Lesser infant mortality, awareness of hygiene, sanitation in rural areas, higher enrolment in primary education, eagerness among children for formal and vocational trainings, overwhelming employment of females in labour-intensive industries, lesser domestic violence and stronger cohesion among family members are, among many other positive developments, the ultimate fruition of educated and self-employed men and women in Bangladesh.
The major contribution to the Gross domestic Product (GDP) of a developing nation like ours that truly counts is how much is invested in educating the females for them to become well-informed mothers, how much the females ignore their fears of being hurt by social taboos and how boldly the mothers can go ahead in equipping themselves and their children with nutrition and basic education. Education for our females is all the more important because they are the ones who are to bear the babies in their wombs and nurture our next generations.
"Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you the birth of a civilised, educated nation" said Napoleon Bonaparte more than 200 years ago. This saying, quoted in hundreds of papers and lectures, may by this time have become a cliché in many societies, but not in Bangladesh where it remains as relevant as ever at least until 80 per cent of Bangladeshi women are educated in the true sense.
Today's education is no more only the basic education that classes of the primary and secondary schools have been providing traditionally. Today's education must provide a survival kit for the young. How a young person is equipped with technical knowledge that is in great demand in the working world at home and abroad should be the main criterion of today's education in Bangladesh.
In order to focus attention on the importance of population issues in the context of overall development plans and programmes the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1989 decided to observe World Population Day on July 11 every year. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message for World Population Day 2104 said: "On this World Population Day, I call on all with influence to prioritize youth in development plans, strengthen partnerships with youth-led organisations, and involve young people in all decisions that affect them. By empowering today's youth, we will lay the groundwork for a more sustainable future for generations to come."
The theme of World Population Day 2014 is: "Investing in Young People". Today we have to make an appraisal of the youth potentialities in Bangladesh. Out of our population of more than 166 million about 20 per cent are young, aged between 15 and 24 and 38 per cent are matured, aged between 25 and 54, according statistics available in the website of the Central Intelligence of America (CIA). These young people are going to shape the future of Bangladesh. With the current population growth rate of 1.60 per cent our planning should be focused more on population development than on population control.
World population has edged to 7.0 billion people in 2011 (up from 2.5 billion in 1950) of which 1.8 billion are young people who are going to shape social and economic realities, challenging norms and values, and building the foundation of the world's future. There would be fierce competition for jobs and survival among these young people.
There would however be opportunities for the youths in countries like Bangladesh where, unlike in Japan and in many other developed countries, there is no negative population growth. Due to negative population growth there are already shortages of working adults in those countries. It is now an opportunity for Bangladesh to turn our increasing population into productive global human resources to fill those shortages of global workforce.
People in many parts of the world are living longer than in the past thanks to modern medicine, while mainly due to apathy towards marriage the growth of young people, who are to support the pensions of the elderly people, is either negative or freezing in the developed world.
Today while thinking of investing in the young people we have to first think about their education and decide what type of education is appropriate for the majority of our population and which educational institutions are capable of producing workforces that can meet the job demands at home and abroad.
Bangladeshi taxpayers cannot afford to pay for luxury higher education, for example, on literature, anthropology or international relations that wards of rich people can learn at their own expenses from any university in the East or the West. Time has arrived for overhauling the whole higher education system in the public sector. We now have to reinvent the university education in Bangladesh.
Though it may sound weird to some pundits, the government should think about turning the classrooms of the government colleges and universities as practical laboratories, rather "factories", to dispense courses that can help one make money immediately. Courses like foreign language (especially English and Chinese), information technology, medicine, nursing, accounting, merchandising, and disciplines of science and engineering, to cite a few, should be offered by the public colleges and universities, leaving other non-technical higher academic disciplines for the private universities to take care of.
Lest private universities exploit the poor by exorbitant tuition fees, curriculums of those higher disciplines in arts have to be custom-tailored in manners so that a student may have options to learn online all the courses of those disciplines and can appear in periodical examinations under state-run open universities to qualify for accredited certifications recognisable to employers anywhere in the world.
Brick and mortar businesses of education must find it difficult to compete with web-based learning because the latter usually have lower operating costs and greater flexibility.
There may, however, be opposition from the teachers of the universities if the government decides to open web-based classes for higher education. But if the government really cares about the future of our nation, they should not be budged by any pressure from any quarter in making our higher education, save and except the practical parts, completely web-based.
The internet has already upended higher education in the West. Now the MOOC or "Massive Open Online Course" is offering students the chance to listen to star lecturers of famous universities and get a full-fledged degree for free or for a fraction of the cost of attending a university. Teachers in USA have already started retraining themselves to fit into the future online education and the US government has been deploying lesser funds for conventional universities.
An intelligent entrepreneur in Bangladesh can perhaps open a money-making machine if he or she opens today online classrooms for university education at, say, 10 per cent of the cost of a private university for the same higher education offered by the conventional universities.
We have to remember that a new revolution has already begun in the job markets of the world. Automation is replacing the human labour on such a scale that not only cars and aircrafts would soon be driverless and pilotless, most of the offices and factories would soon be furnished by robots, making major blue-collar as well as white-collar jobs redundant in a matter of a few years. The only jobs that would not soon be snatched away by robotics are those where human brains and hands are absolutely necessary, such as the job of a healthcare giver or an intelligence-based job of a software programmer. Our young people should bear in mind the kind of non-automated jobs they would be vying for in future.   
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