The third phase of National Household Database (NHD) programme began on Monday to prepare a flawless database to identify economic status of the people aiming to eliminate poverty.The government has set a target of collecting data from 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, Md Shafiul Alam, Project Director of NHD, told the inaugural function of Training of Trainers (ToT) at Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) here. The National Household Database Project under the BBS has organised the training programme in cooperation with Thengamara Mohila Sabuj Sangha (TMSS). Secretary-in-Charge of Statistics and Informatics Division, Additional Secretary (Development) of Statistics and Informatics Division Bikash Kishore Das, Director of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of TMSS Nigar Sultana and Project Director of NHD Programme Md Shafiul Alam, among others, addressed the function with BBS Director General Md Amir Hossain in the chair.
According to the NHD programme, first phase and second phase of the programme have been implemented successfully. A total of 17 districts of Rangpur, Barishal and Mymensingh divisions were under the first phase of NHD programme.
Under the second phase, data were collected from households in 25 districts of the three divisions – Dhaka, Chattogram and Mymensingh. The NHD project was officially launched in 2013 and it will be completed by December, 2018, the project sources said. “We are using Proxy Mean Test-Formula (PMTF) to assess economic status of every household in Bangladesh,” Shafiul said adding data will be collected from households of 22 districts under three divisions – Rajshahi, Khulna and Sylhet.
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.” 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.” Nigar Sultana said, “We have completed first phase of NHD project successfully with valuable cooperation of the local administration. Without the assistance of local administrations, we would not have been able to prepare a perfect household database.”
After preparing of NHD, real beneficiaries will be included in the social safety-net programme, she said adding NHD will significantly help achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) through successful implementation of social safety-net programme..
