RESULTS
Support to Fight COVID-19:
Within three weeks of detection of the first COVID-19 case in Bangladesh, the World Bank approved $100 million to help Bangladesh test, treat, manage the COVID-19 infection, as well as strengthen the public health system. The financing helped Bangladesh ramp up COVID-19 testing and strengthen treatment through ensuring supplies of critical items like ventilators, oxygen concentrators, ICU beds, high flow oxygen cannula, and personal protective equipment as well as work for setting up liquid medical oxygen systems at 30 public facilities is ongoing. In March 2021, the World Bank approved additional $500 million to support the national vaccination program.
Further, since the pandemic started, the World Bank approved $1.7 billion to support Bangladesh with the aim of “building back better,” including an agenda for reforms and effective investments which will leverage the private sector, help job recovery, create job, boost human capital development, and strengthen protections for the vulnerable people.
Education
IDA is the largest external funder in the education sector covering the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, as well as technical and vocational education and training, and education for the hard-to-reach children.
Bangladesh has made remarkable gains in ensuring access to education in the past two decades. In 2018, the country’s net enrollment rate at the primary school level reached above 97 percent, and that at secondary school level, around 69 percent.
With nearly 9.1 million girls in secondary schools in 2019, Bangladesh is among the few developing countries to achieve gender parity in school enrollment and has more girls than boys in secondary schools. Improving the quality of education remains the largest challenge for Bangladesh at all levels.
Yet due to drop out rates, around 18 percent of children ages 6-11 remain out of school – either having never enrolled or dropped out before completing grade 5. The Reaching-Out-of-School (ROSC II) Project helps address bringing the poor and out-of-school children to schools and enable them to complete Grade 5 and transition to secondary education.
The Skills and Training Enhancement Project (STEP) helped to strengthen and improve the quality of skills training and employability of youth, both at home and abroad. Around, 150,000 graduates have completed programs in 100 polytechnic institutions.
The World Bank is supporting the government respond to the COVID-19 impact and build back a better and resilient education system through new and existing operations. These operations support remote learning, safe school reopening, student learning assessment and remedial education, enhancing digital connectivity and capacity building for better-prepared school teachers and management at local and central levels.
Health, Nutrition and Population
The World Bank has been a longstanding partner in helping the country’s health sector. The statistics speaks for itself: assisted deliveries by skilled birth attendance, increased from 5% in 1991 to 32% in 2011. This has helped reduce maternal mortality rates from 574/100000 live births in 1990 to 194/100000 Live births in 2010: and the under-five mortality rate from 151/1000 live births in 1990 to 53/1000 live births in 2011. Today, nearly 80% of Bangladeshi children receive vitamin A supplements and over 85% are fully vaccinated, setting Bangladesh on the pathway to achieving some targets of Sustainable Development Goal 3 - reducing maternal and under-5 mortality. In fact, a Bangladeshi born today is more likely to live a quarter of a century more than a child born in 1972.
Despites of enviable progress made, there remains a significant unfinished agenda with regards to essential maternal, child health and nutritional services. At the same time, as Bangladesh transitions to a middle-income economy, the country needs to address rapid increase in Non-Communicable Diseases, and, be prepared for emerging infectious diseases such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For tackling these challenges, the country’s health system needs to be strengthened for both quality and equity of health services, through increase in public spending on health, improvement in governance and stewardship, as well as enhancement in human resource for health. The World Bank is aligning financial and technical support to Bangladesh in order to meet these challenges. The Bank supports the government’s fourth Health Nutrition Population sector program.
Energy
The access to electricity in Bangladesh reached to 99.5% (grid and off-grid) and the current installed generation capacity has increased to 25,235 MW including captive power and renewables. IDA support has so far added 2,652 MW electricity to the national grid, and 118 MW in off-grid areas through installation of solar home systems, solar irrigation pumps, solar mini-grids and installed more than 2.3 million improved cookstoves. Another 310 MW capacity will be added to the national grid through ongoing grid-tied solar projects.
The World Bank supports promoting power sector policies and institutional capacity building within the Government, power and gas utilities and Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) with the aim to improve the financial health, investment, and service quality.
The World Bank has $1.85 billion of ongoing support in the energy sector to enhance capacity, generate clean energy, improve efficiency in generation and transmission & system operation, reduce technical losses, improve transmission and rural distribution network as well as increase access to both grid and renewable electricity.
Agriculture
Despite high population density, decreasing arable land, and frequent natural disasters, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in achieving food security and reducing poverty. Agricultural production value has increased faster than most of the country's regional peers at 3.54% per year in the two recent decades (1999-2019). However, self-sufficiency is continuously threatened by a decrease of arable land by 0.4% per year, an increasing population, and declining output growth with the share of agriculture in total GDP decreasing from 22.7% in 1999 to just 13.35% in 2019/20 (provisional). This has contributed to a decline in employment growth and to a slowdown in poverty reduction.
In the agriculture sector, the World Bank supports the government towards climate resilient diversification, value addition for greater job creation, entrepreneurship, safer, and more efficient food systems. The World Bank is helping over 1.8 million rural households modernize farm practices and use new climate smart technologies and 2 million household farmers, small and medium-scale agro-entrepreneurs to improve livestock production sustainably, with higher productivity and better market access. Simultaneously, the World Bank supported 500,000 households to increase grain reserves to meet their post-disaster needs and is helping the country improve the quality and efficiency of grain storage management.
The World Bank is helping Bangladesh address food insecurity in challenging times, by increasing the storage capacity of Bangladesh’s national strategic grain reserves by 535,500 tons for 4.5 million households and helping business continuity for 620,000 among the most vulnerable households in the livestock sector during the COVID crisis.
New operations are emphasizing the One Health approach and climate smart agricultural practices to build back better in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Climate Change
Bangladesh’s geographical position renders it especially vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. The Global Climate Risk Index ranks Bangladesh as the world’s seventh most affected country over the period 2000-2019 (Germanwatch 2021).
The World Bank continues to help Bangladesh address climate change impacts and disaster risk management. The country has built stronger disaster-coping mechanisms which helped to reduce cyclone related deaths by 100-fold since 1970.
IDA has an ongoing portfolio of US$1.3 billion supporting Bangladesh to build resilience against natural disasters and climate change impacts. Key interventions so far include - 1,313 repaired or newly constructed multi-purpose disaster shelters, 375 km of climate-resilient roads built for last-mile connectivity, rehabilitation of 745 km of embankments, restoration or construction of 471 hydraulic structures for sustainable water management, and 473 ha in 10 coastal polders afforested with 1,182,500 seedlings, following a social afforestation approach. All of these are benefiting 5.69 million in climate-vulnerable coastal Bangladesh.
Environment
About 37,000 hectares of block plantations and 3,000 km of strip plantations have been completed in climate vulnerable areas with additional 60,000 hectares of plantations in the pipeline in coastal and hilly areas to increase climate resilience. Around 40,000 people residing in saline, flood and drought prone areas have received adaptive basic needs (house, water, agriculture, health) and livelihood support; about 6,000 poor and forest dependent households in 200 communities have participated in the alternative livelihoods support programs and currently further 180,000 individuals of 600 forest dependent villages are receiving similar support.
In addition, 46,777 poor climate vulnerable coastal fisher families in 450 fisher villages are receiving livelihood support, and training and competitive conditional grant of 200 shrimp farming clusters will be supported with climate smart technology market linkages. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bangladesh Sustainable Coastal and Marine Fisheries Project also mobilized funding for cash transfer to 77,826 coastal fish and shrimp farmers.
Water & Sanitation
IDA support has helped build piped and non-piped water sources that provided safe and arsenic-free water to nearly 1.5 million beneficiaries. In Chattogram, the second largest city in Bangladesh, almost 780,000 people now have access to water supply, including those in the urban slums.
A total of 20,475 deep tube wells, rain-water harvesting structures, pond sand filter and ring wells were constructed. In addition, 247,500 10,24,090 people received improved sanitation access from 55,000 new latrines.
Governance
With IDA support, Bangladesh introduced an electronic government procurement (e-GP) system in 2012 that transformed the public procurement process into one that is more efficient, transparent, and accountable. Bangladesh spends about $25 billion on public procurement annually—equivalent to roughly 40% of its annual budget—the country’s e-GP system has contributed to average annual savings of $1.1 billion, enough money to build over 10,000 km of rural roads or 8,000 primary schools.
In addition, it has decreased 50,000 tons of CO2 emissions each year by cutting an estimated 170 million kilometers of travel annually. And the e-GP system has made doing business easier for private sector bidders, contributing to an increase in the number of registered bidders from 23,000 in FY2017 to more than 80,000 for FY2020.
Since 2006, IDA has been supporting a nationwide program that augments the government’s block grants provided to all 4,504 Union Parishads (the lowest tier of elected local government). The block grant enables Union Parishads to decide and spend on local priorities. Since 2006, the discretionary funds that a Union Parishad receives annually has grown by more than ten-fold and has benefitted 130 million people.
Hundreds of community schemes generating employment for the poor have been implemented, including construction or rehabilitation of rural roads, culverts, drainage and embankment systems; water and sanitation facilities; and schools and clinics. Thirty percent of the schemes are women-preferred schemes. Under the ongoing third project, IDA is assisting to institutionalize the block grants with the government’s own resources and supporting a pilot for an urban fiscal transfer system in 16 municipalities, to be scaled-up across all Urban Local Bodies through future World Bank operations.
Social Protection and Jobs
The Bank has been a longtime partner, providing financing and technical support to help Bangladesh strengthen and modernize social protection programs.
Investing in early childhood development to improve nutrition and cognitive development can help prevent intergenerational transmission of poverty. The Bank supports the Income Support Program for the Poorest (ISPP) Project, known as Jawtno (“nurture”) program. Under the program, $250 million provided cash transfers to over 600,000 mothers of young children or pregnant mothers in exchange for them attending programs designed to improve their child’s health and nutrition in locations with high poverty and malnutrition, while over 90% of families benefited from regular services.
Through the $750 million Jobs Development Policy Credits (DPC), the Bank has supported reforms to modernize the investment environment, protect workers, and promote access to jobs for vulnerable population groups. The $200 million Recovery and Advancement of Informal Sector Employment (RAISE) Project supports enhancements to the earning opportunities of urban youth and returning migrants. It combines support to apprenticeships, entrepreneurship development, self-employment, informal microenterprises, and migrant reintegration services, with an aim to boost economic inclusion of over 350,000 individuals.
The Bank supports the establishment and adoption of common digital platforms to enhance service delivery of social assistance programs with a combination of investment and results-based financing via the $845 million Safety Net Systems for the Poorest (SNSP) Project and the $300 million Cash Transfer Modernization (CTM) Project. These projects support information systems and data digitization to better manage programs which address over 20 million poor individuals. They have also supported the development and use of the country’s first social registry – the National Household Database – to enhance program targeting accuracy, as well as the adoption of digital payment for over 9 million recipients of the largest social pensions in collaboration with local-level public-private “digital centers” and Bangladesh’s vast network of mobile money agents.
Support to Address Challenges Created by Influx of Displaced Rohingya Population
Bangladesh has generously provided shelter to more than 1 million displaced Rohingya population fleeing from violence in Myanmar. Through $590 million grant financing in five projects, the World Bank is helping the Bangladesh government to support both the displaced Rohingya population – until their safe and voluntary return to Myanmar – and the host communities in Cox’s Bazar.
24/7 healthcare facilities as well as dedicated COVID-19 treatment centers are providing health, nutrition, and family planning services to men, women, and children, including basic immunization for children in the camps. Women and adolescent girls are receiving psychosocial support and learning about preventing gender-based violence at the Women-friendly spaces.
More than 1,300 learning centers are providing learning and psychosocial support to 350,000 Rohingya children and youths. During the movement restrictions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of children, half of whom are girls, received home-based caregiver support. Youth in the host communities are also being provided access to vocational training.
Furthermore, solar powered mini piped water schemes throughout the camps are helping more than 200,000 displaced Rohingya people get safe water. Around 250 km of climate resilient roads have been built, as well as 3,000 solar streetlights and 34 multipurpose disaster shelters for the Rohingya people. The host community in Cox’s Bazar has also benefited with 1,000 solar streetlights and 40 multipurpose disaster shelters.
The national safety net program is providing livelihoods and income support to 40,000 poor and vulnerable households in host communities, while scaling up social protection coverage for 85,000 Rohingya households.
Through these projects, the World Bank is supporting Bangladesh to develop stronger program capacities to build resilience and respond to future shocks.
Last Updated: Oct 03, 2021
