The World Bank (WB) on Friday approved $600 million loan to Bangladesh for two projects to help over 1.75 million poor and vulnerable people, including youths, women, disadvantaged groups and returnee migrant workers to improve their skills for employability and create livelihood opportunities to absorb future shocks from disasters such as Covid-19, said a report published in the New Nation on Saturday.
As we see the WB is a major donor helping Bangladesh achieve socio-economic
progress since independence. In the past, there were numerous similar projects for transforming the livelihood of the poor. It runs over billions of dollars so far but to our knowledge, there is hardly any numerical assessment of how many poor were trained or made skilled, except the government claim of big success in poverty reduction. All garment workers or such other workers were self-trained at their workplaces.
We have so far seen that such WB loans made local and international bureaucracy and political leadership rich overnight. WB itself as a lender is not away from such accusation. International consultants grabbed a big part of the funds while local bureaucrats as project directors and coordinators controlled the fund and made undue fortunes. They undertake expensive foreign tours for knowledge gathering on how the poor can be transformed but the poor remain poor. We would like to say that the WB must make sure the best use of the fund.
In Bangladesh, Covid-19 pandemic has affected the livelihoods of thousands, particularly, female workers, youths, and returnee migrant workers the report said adding that two projects have been designed to broadly support the affected rural poor and informal labourers to be trained to learn new skills. Those who want to set up new businesses must be given support. It aims to train more than 1 million youths and workers with skills needed for future work, in addition to helping another 75,0000 to achieve entrepreneurship ability across 3,200 villages in 20 districts.
These aims are good but it may be too big a challenge to our leadership and bureaucracy which has apparently little capacity and efficiency to create the outreach. But we don’t want to see that the money for the poor is wasted either.
