MDG Report 2012 - United Nations in Bangladesh

productive transformations in the country‟s economy along with much greater potentials forproductive employment generation.While this Report demonstrates Bangladesh‟s capacity for achieving the goal of povertyreduction within the target timeframe, attaining food security and nutritional wellbeingremains a challenge. The challenges of attaining some targets such as eradicating extremepoverty and hunger (MDG 1), achieving universal primary education (MDG 2), improvingmaternal mortality (MDG 5), and attaining environmental sustainability (MDG 7) are stillformidable and perhaps comparable to similar challenges faced by other South Asiancountries.In terms of MDG 2, especially relating to the goal of achieving universal primary education,the Report brings out significant challenges that the education sector faces in achieving thetargets which include ensuring survival rate to grade V, improving quality of primaryeducation, increasing share of education in government budget and increasing coverage andimproving quality of adolescent and adult literacy programmes. Achieving gender parity atthe tertiary level also remains as a big challenge. Similarly, the share of women in wageemployment in non-agriculture is hovering around 20 percent for the last two decades. Theproportion of seats held by women in national parliament, though impressive, is unlikely toachieve the target of 33 percent in 2015.In the case of improving maternal mortality (MDG 5), Bangladesh is on track to achieve thetarget of reducing maternal mortality ratio but the target of universal access to reproductivehealth needs more attention even for ensuring the sustainability of the success achieved sofar. Similarly, notwithstanding the low incidence of the communicable diseases and theprogress made in the area, Bangladesh faces significant challenges in maintaining the trend.These include inadequate coverage of most at risk population, limited technical andmanagerial capacity, and lack of strategic information management.For environmental sustainability (MDG 7), some of the important challenges are: ensuringefficient use of forest resources, lack of facilitating technology, lack of proper regulation andadequate enforcement that reveal the gaps in expected fisheries sector development,inadequate information in the area of chemical fertilizer consumption and energy mix, anddeveloping water efficient agricultural practices. Concerted efforts are needed to overcomethese challenges and for sustainable growth and development in achieving the MDGs relatedto environmental sustainability.For MDG 8, a genuine global partnership for development is yet to emerge which is mostlydue to the absence of the expected cooperation from the OECD and developed donorcountries as promised in the Millennium Development Declaration. Thus stimulatingeffective global partnership especially focusing on the development of the LDCs likeBangladesh remains as yet a big challenge for the future.Bangladesh, like other less developed countries, suffers from significant development gapsincluding slow and fluctuating economic growth, rising inequalities, inadequate structuraltransformation, gaps in achieving the MDGs, persistence of food insecurity, low employment109