Making aid effective | Governance/security | Public services | Poverty/vulnerability | Private sector
The UK government is Bangladesh’s largest bilateral grant donor: during the past four years, we’ve given aid totalling £475 million and spent over £130 million in 2008/09.
Our objectives in Bangladesh are to embed democratic values, give all Bangladeshis the opportunity to prosper, and create stability.
Over the last three years, we’ve focused on supporting Bangladesh to achieve goals in four broad areas:
The UK has been at the forefront of efforts to harmonise donors’ programmes and policies in Bangladesh to improve aid effectiveness. In conjunction with other key donors, we’re planning to work with the new government to develop a Government of Bangladesh/Donor Joint Cooperation Strategy within the next two years.
The aim of this is to create a national framework, based on the Bangladeshi government’s poverty reduction strategy. This will be a significant challenge.
Corruption, violence and lack of security slows poverty reduction, holds back economic growth and impacts directly, and hardest, on the poor. According to Transparency International, Bangladesh is 147th (out of 180) on the 2008 Corruption Perception Index. We want it to actively fight corruption and account better for the money it spends.We also want Bangladeshi people to be measurably safer and more secure because of improved policing, and for poor people to be better able to claim their legal rights.
The UK’s projects in this sector focus on:
For example, with aid of £21 million over six years, we’ve been assisting the Ministry of Finance to improve public financial management and enhance its ability to target resources according to need.
With other donors, we funded (£12 million over three years) Bangladesh’s Election Commission to prepare a credible voter roll - that is, an electoral roll with photographs - for the elections in 2008, and establish the technical infrastructure required for the government to maintain and update it. Under this programme, more than 80 million voters were registered – a remarkable achievement, contributing to the huge voter turnout of 86% in the elections of December 2008.
Despite an overall increase in the population’s well-being, Bangladesh’s public services are failing the poor. Nearly half of all children don’t complete primary school. Poor pregnant women often can’t get medical care, and more than 12,000 of them die every year due to complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Also, each year a quarter of all children under five fall sick, and 35,000 of them die, from diarrhoea or diarrhoea with pneumonia.
The UK is investing substantially in health and primary education through government-led sector-wide programmes, which bring together a number of donors. To strengthen the provision of healthcare services, we provide approximately £25 million annually, working with the government, the United Nations and NGOs. UK-funded programmes have already ensured that 14 million urban dwellers have access to basic health services.
We’re also helping to improve hygiene practices and access to improved sanitation and safe, reliable water. UK support to a joint UNICEF-Government of Bangladesh programme from 2000 to 2006 helped 7.5 million people to access improved sanitation and to adopt important hygiene practices, such as hand washing after using the latrine or before preparing food. With an additional £36 million this hygiene education will be extended to some 30 million people by 2011.
In addition, our support for education has enabled 4.5 million children to receive basic schooling.
We’re also funding parallel initiatives to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth and the deaths of newborn babies. These initiatives are testing promising community-based innovations that could improve the delivery of mainstream health services.
At least 50% of Bangladesh’s population is attempting to survive below the international poverty line. Of these, almost 15 million Bangladeshis (10% of the population) comprise the extreme poor, who struggle each day to survive on less than 60 cents a day. Monga – seasonal periods of hunger due to lack of income – still affect millions every year, as do flooding and cyclones/tropical storms. It only takes a single traumatic event to reduce an entire family to extreme poverty.
Over the nine years between 2005 and 2014, the UK will spend £145 million on regular grants to the very poor and extreme poor (social transfers) through which 5.5 million people will be lifted out of extreme poverty.
To tackle extreme poverty, we are providing the poorest people - especially women and girls - with income-generating assets and helping them to obtain credit and take advantage of other economic opportunities. For example, in 2008 we provided over £13 million in cash and productive assets to 140,000 extremely poor women. We have also committed £75 million to a seven-year second phase of the Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction programme, the first phase of which benefited 100,000 women. This support aims to help a further 800,000 extremely poor women and their households earn their way out of poverty. So far 285,000 women have benefited under this second phase.
Through the Chars Livelihoods Programme (£50 million over eight years) we have helped people living on chars (sand islands). As a result of the programme, 62,000 homesteads have so far been raised above the 1998 flood level, and it has provided livestock, seeds and other items to almost 50,000 families in this low-lying, flood-prone area.
However, climate change threatens to undo many of the development gains of recent years, by:
We recently made a commitment of £75 million over five years to help Bangladesh implement its new Climate Change Strategy. This will go some way towards protecting the lives and livelihoods of some 15 million people who live in the most vulnerable places of Bangladesh. We also aim to help the Bangladesh government’s to include climate change prominently in its developmental planning, support research and modelling.
The economy of Bangladesh is growing and many businesses are doing well, and decades of steady economic growth has helped a lot of people get out of poverty. We’re working with the private sector to stimulate more investment so that it brings economic opportunities for millions more poor women and men, including the extreme poor.
Our work addresses both investment and reforms. One aspect improves the investment climate (and thus the amount of investment) through better business practice and regulation. The other helps millions of poor people access the opportunities and benefits of economic growth. We work with small and medium-scale enterprises (which account for 80% of employment in Bangladesh), as well as large companies, in markets that can create more jobs.
Bookmark with:
What are Bookmarks?
More news stories
More publications
Research information from R4D
RSS feed from R4Dopens in a new window
What's RSS?