Speakers for flawless household database to eradicate poverty

Speakers at a function have laid emphasis on preparing a flawless National Household Database (NHD) to identify economic status of the people aiming to eliminate poverty.
The government has set a target of collecting data from 30.5 million (3.5 crore) households of the country for preparing NHD to find out the number of poor people to bring them under social safety-net programme, they told the inaugural function of Training of Trainers (ToT) at Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in the capital on Wednesday, reports BSS.
The National Household Database Project under the BBS has organised the training programme in cooperation with Thengamara Mohila Sabuj Sangha (TMSS).
BBS Director General Md Amir Hossain chaired the function. Additional Secretary (Development) of Statistics and Informatics Division Bikash Kishore Das, Additional Secretary (Information Management) Mahmuda Akhtar, Director of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of TMSS Nigar Sultana and Project Director of NHD Programme Md Shafiul Alam addressed the programme, among others.
Shafiul said the second phase of NHD will begin on January 14 and it will continue till February 2 to collect data from households in 25 districts of three divisions - Dhaka, Chittagong and Mymensingh.
"All districts of Dhaka and Chittagong and Netrakona district under Mymensingh division will be covered to collect data from all households," he informed.
"We are using Proxy Mean Test-Formula (PMTF) to assess economic status of every household in Bangladesh," Shafiul said.
Bikash said, "NHD, an online database, will be prepared based on economic status of every household to bring the target group under the social safety- net programme which will remove all sorts of irregularities."
The NHD project was officially launched in 2013 and it will be completed by December, 2018, the project sources said. Under the project, data will be collected from 30.5 million (3.5 cr) households across the country in three phases, they added.
BBS DG Amir said, "As the country has no household database, we cannot assess economic condition at family level, which is hampering the poverty reduction efforts of the government. I believe that the NHD will remove overlapping practices of social safety-net programmes."
Referring to the latest BBS data revealed in October, 2016, its officials said percentage of extreme poor in the country is 12.9 while overall rate of poor people is 18.5.
Nigar Sultana said, "We have completed first phase of NHD project successfully with valuable cooperation of local administration. Without the assistance of local administration, we would not be able to prepare a perfect household database."