The 2005 Household Survey found that 40% of the population was below the 2122 calorie threshold. This compares with 59% in 1991, the baseline year for the poverty MDG in Bangladesh.
Bangladeshi woman and child
Bangladeshi woman and child © Shahidul Alam/Drik / New Internationalist
Prospects for achieving the Goal of halving this figure to 29% by 2015 may have been set back by events since 2005. In addition to external shocks relating to food prices and global economic recession, Bangladesh has suffered a sequence of natural disasters, notably Cyclone Sidr in 2007.
The country’s measure of poverty is so sensitive to the price of food that the Centre for Policy Dialogue, a Dhaka think-tank, has estimated that the increase in food prices in 2007/08 added 8.5% of the population to the ranks of the poor.
The profile of poverty in Bangladesh is uneven, the most severe deprivation being found in the southern coastal belt and in the northern monga regions prone to seasonal food shortages.
The capital, Dhaka, is believed to be the fastest expanding and most densely populated of the world’s major cities. In common with other Bangladeshi cities, informal slum areas accommodate as much as a third of the urban population, imposing a new and challenging dimension for poverty reduction.
Since the 2007 crisis, the government has responded with increasingly robust expenditure on a wide range of cash and food-based social safety net schemes.
However, inefficiencies of bureaucracy and corruption have jeopardised the targeting of this spending. As few as 13% of the poorest households may be in receipt of benefits intended for their welfare.
In an unprecedented acknowledgement of its shortcomings, the government devoted the opening chapter of its 2009 MDG Progress Report to the subject of “Democratic Governance and Human Rights.” And the current National Strategy for Accelerated Poverty Reduction (2009-2011) concedes that “unless governance improves, poor people will continue to suffer.”
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Poverty in India | Facts About India
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Bangladesh Poverty, a OneWorld briefing