Government must invest more in health, education to overcome challenges

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. Though Bangladesh has made progress in some areas, including ensuring gender parity in primary education and reducing child mortality, it still has a long way to go 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 has 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. They 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 these years, the total fertility rate is not declining. So, there is a genuine concern for the 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 that building infrastructure gets more attention than building human capital and eliminating poverty, educating people and making them aware of the social taboo.
It’s really a big question– why not the government invest more and more in the health and education sectors and make the demographic dividend a profiteering for the development.