BANGLADESH is facing huge population and development related challenges owing to high prevalence of child marriage, early pregnancy, and sluggish progress in family planning and poor youth unemployment. The challenges have become daunting due to rising violence against women and children, lack of good governance, high rate of maternal death and inadequate access of poor people to healthcare facilities. In the 25 years of International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), Bangladesh has made progress in many areas, including registering steady economic growth, ensuring gender parity in primary education, and reducing child mortality but still a long path is ahead off for overall human resource development.
Experts said that the extent of child marriage has reduced since 1994, but still remains high. The government had a target of Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) to 72 per cent by 2015 but it is remained stagnant at 62 per cent for the last several years. The share of youth not in education, employment or training is 29.8 per cent of the total youth populations, meaning a dangerous portion of youth are found nowhere. Experts said Bangladesh is passing through the phase of demographic dividend and it does not have enough time to reap the benefits.
The cost of preventing women from dying in childbirth is projected to increase six-fold by 2030, requiring billions of dollars to achieve global targets. In the years, total fertility rate is not declining. So, there is a genuine concern for government on how to address the issue. However, the Family Planning Department is not empowered enough as it does not get adequate budgetary allocation. The development paradox of Bangladesh is building infrastructure get more attention than building human capital and elimination of poverty, educating people and making them aware against the social taboo.
It’s really a big question– why not the government invests more and more in health and education sectors and makes the demographic dividend a profiteering for the development.
