Bangladesh Can Prosper With More and Better Jobs for Women

[Nilgiri]

Bangladesh rates better than the US and Mexico, no joke. Of course we know why.

Yes the much famed BBS 3 millioner "stats".

Then when the rare people that venture to Bangladesh actually go there to see things on the ground....its like what is this 4th world place...."women liberation"? LOL.

Then they look up the youtube videos of Bangladesh, recorded on the ground... and go "duhhhh" shoulda watched those first....than trust in some govt propaganda numbers dept....that has proven lied big time for the very foundation narrative of a country (and prosecute you if you question it and resist the groupthink openly).

If BAL-BBS could change on paper what Bangladeshis earn/reproduce/act/establish when they emigrate to 3rd party countries, they would. Too bad for BAL STRONK they can't....and the reality projected by those emigrants on the ground helps in keeping majority travelers the hell away from BD in first place. Phew!.....but I suppose that just helps BAL form its cocooned propaganda in the end even more. Too bad for BD in the end. Lose - lose echo chamber confirmation bias for them (elitist dream types) and the common BD person who doesnt give a crap about BAL posturing suffers just as before.

 

[Bilal9]

Instead of someone's Bullsh*t opinion, here are the facts from DAWN itself (which quotes the World Economic Forum stats). Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have done it, it is doable, and Pakistan can do this as well.

Pakistan among worst performers on gender equality: WEF
Amin Ahmed

Updated December 19, 2018

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is the second worst country in the world in terms of gender parity, ranking 148 out of 149 countries in the ‘Global Gender Gap Index 2018’ report released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday.

According to the report, four Muslim countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Pakistan — are the four worst-performers in the world where the number of women holding managerial positions is the lowest.

Also read: Women must wait 217 years to earn the same as men, index says

Categorised as the lowest-ranked country in South Asia, Pakistan closed 55 per cent of its overall gender gap as compared to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka which were the top-ranked countries in the region, having closed just over 72pc and nearly 68pc of their overall gender gap, respectively.

The Geneva-based organisation’s annual report tracked disparities between the genders in 149 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.

Pakistan’s scorecard showed that in terms of economic participation and opportunity, it ranked 146th, while in health and survival, its rank was 145. In terms of political empowerment, the country was positioned at 97. Pakistan’s population was growing at the rate of 1.93pc per annum, the report pointed out.

Report indicates it will take centuries to achieve gender parity in workplaces around the globe

Pakistan made some good progress this year in wage equality as well as on the educational attainment sub-index. However, this progress was insufficiently rapid to avoid the country being overtaken by a number of faster-improving countries at the lower end of the index’s global rankings, the report added.

After years of advances in education, health, and political representation, women registered setbacks in all three areas this year, the WEF said. Only in the area of economic opportunity did the gender gap narrow somewhat, although there was not much to celebrate, with the global wage gap narrowing to nearly 51 pc, it added. To date, said the WEF, there was still a 32pc average gender gap that remained to be closed.

It highlighted that factors such as stagnation in the proportion of women in the workplace and women’s declining representation in politics, coupled with greater inequality in access to health and education, offset improvements in wage equality and the number of women in professional positions, left the global gender gap only slightly reduced in 2018.

The report showed that there were now proportionately fewer women than men participating in the workforce, suggesting that automation was having a disproportionate impact on jobs traditionally performed by women.

Women, WEF observed, were significantly under-represented in growing areas of employment that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. It decried the particularly low participation of women within the artificial intelligence field, where they made up just 22pc of the workforce.

Projecting current trends into the future, it added that the overall global gender gap would close in 108 years across the 106 countries covered since the first edition of the report. It said that the most challenging gender gaps to close were the economic and political empowerment dimensions, which would take 202 and 107 years to close, respectively.

Across the 149 countries assessed by the report, there were just 17 that currently had women as heads of state, while on average just 18pc of ministers and 24pc of parliamentarians globally were women.

Similarly, women held just 34pc of managerial positions across the countries where data was available, and less than 7pc in the in the four worst-performing countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Pakistan.

With an average remaining gender gap of 34.2pc, South Asia was the second-lowest scoring region on this year’s Global Gender Gap Index, ahead of the Middle East and North Africa and behind Sub-Saharan Africa.

With the exception of Bangladesh and Pakistan at either end of South Asia’s regional table, gender parity outcomes were somewhat homogeneous across the region. The difference in gender gap size between the highest-ranked and lowest-ranked countries in the region was about 10pc for the educational attainment sub-index and about 4pc for health and survival.

On political empowerment, one country — Bangladesh — reached a level of gender parity of more than 50pc, while India had closed nearly 40pc of its gender gap on this sub-index. The region’s remaining countries had yet to achieve a gender parity level of at least 20pc, the report said.

It is worth noting that, from a low base, South Asia had made the fastest progress on closing its gender gap of any world region over the past decade. In terms of year-on-year progress, out of the seven countries from the region covered by the index this year, four countries increased their overall scores compared to last year, while three had decreased their overall scores.

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2018

Bangladesh beats India by 60 slots in WEF Gender Gap rankings
SIMRIN SIRUR Updated: 25 February, 2019 8:45 am IST

Bangladeshi women undergoing an adult education programme by Bangladesh Youth Leadership Centre (representational image) | Commons

Bangladesh has been ranked 48 in the WEF Gender Gap report, while India stands at 108.

New Delhi: India has been ranked 60 slots below Bangladesh in this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) Gender Gap report, left behind by two other South Asian counterparts as well.

In the survey of 149 countries, India comes in at 108. The country’s rank was the same in 2017, while it was 21 notches higher, at 87, in 2016. The surveys for both these years involved 144 countries.

Last year, the report explained India’s drop in ranking as “largely attributable to a widening of its gender gaps in political empowerment as well as in healthy life expectancy and basic literacy”.

Within South Asia, Bangladesh is the top performer, with a rank of 48. It was also ranked as the region’s gender parity leader in 2017, though at a notch higher (47).

Sri Lanka and Nepal follow, with ranks of 100 and 105, respectively. Bhutan was ranked 122, and the Maldives 113. Afghanistan was not part of the survey.

Pakistan is the second-worst performer the world over, and the worst in south Asia, with a rank of 148. Yemen, caught in a civil war, is the worst.

Iceland maintains its number one ranking for the 10th time in a row. Norway comes second, and Sweden third.

For a closer study
According to the WEF report, the world has managed to close 68 per cent of its gender gap.

India is two percentage points below the world average, at 66 per cent, and a point above South Asia, which clocked 65 per cent.

The report’s findings are based on a country’s performance across four broad categories: Women’s economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment.

The survey measures gender gaps in access to resources and opportunities, rather than focusing on the resources available. This way, it seeks to ensure higher levels of development are not conflated with levels of gender equality. In other words, a fast developing nation like India can still lag when it comes to gender disparities.

Also read:Bangladesh is better off than India, not a poor, backward neighbour anymore

Fall on four parameters
Although the country’s performance was the same as last year’s overall, it slipped on each of the four sub-indices.

When it comes to economic participation and opportunity, India has dropped three slots, to 142 from 139 in 2017.

This index measures the difference between men and women vis-vis workforce participation, wages and remuneration, as well as advancement in their respective fields.

This year, sandwiched between Morocco and Iran, India is only two steps ahead of Saudi Arabia, which takes the 145th place. Iraq came in last, with a ranking of 149.

On the health and survival index — which seeks to estimate the number of “missing women”, that is, deficit of women arising from cultural biases — India has been ranked the third lowest, at 147. The index covers sex ratio at birth and the life expectancy of men and women.

India may have moved down only one notch from last year’s 146, but, according to the report, this widened gender gap makes it “the world’s least-improved country on this subindex over the past decade”.

Although India maintains its place in the top 20 countries in political empowerment, it hangs on by a thin sliver with a rank of 19. Last year, India was at a more comfortable 15.

Last year’s report had warned, “Maintaining its global top 20 ranking on the political empowerment subindex will require India to make progress on this dimension with a new generation of female political leadership.”

Under education attainment, India ranks 114. Last year, India came in at 112.

However, despite the slip, India “records improvements in wage equality for similar work, succeeds in fully closing its tertiary education gender gap for the first time, and keeps primary and secondary education gaps closed for the third year running.”

Also read: Taiwan looks to India for stronger economic ties as it hopes to cut dependence on China

India vs Bangladesh
Speaking about the vast difference between the performance of Bangladesh and India, Roberto Crotti, a co-author of the report, said a big factor was the sex ratio at birth.

“A big difference is the sex ratio at birth. India comes 146/149 on this index, but in Bangladesh the sex ratio is natural…The missing women issue is really holding India back,” he added.

“Compared to India, Bangladesh [also] performs better when it comes to political empowerment at the senior level… There are more women in senior positions than in India,” he added.

Notably, the two of Bangladesh’s tallest leaders are women, former prime minister Khaleda Zia and incumbent Sheikh Hasina.

“The labour force participation rate [in Bangladesh] is 35 per cent, compared to 28 per cent in India,” Crotti added.

Talking about the way forward for India, he said “what could… help India is creating better opportunities for women in the labour force”.

“Women have more technical skills, but that needs to be followed by legislation, awareness, and access to rights and opportunities,” he added.

“What we would expect is that when women are politically empowered, the gender gap is pushed up on their agendas, and with time we would see improvements in other dimensions like labour participation, land rights, and inheritance,” he said.

“But this will take a long time. Over the past 10 years, India has had women in heads-of-state positions 20 per cent of the time — that’s pretty good — but it will take a long time for mentalities to change,” he added. “At the moment, only 13 per cent of women occupy senior positions in the government.”

Artificial Intelligence
Unique to this year’s report is a study on the advent of Artificial Intelligence and its effects on the gender gap. The results are not encouraging, and, according to the report, such data “demonstrates a persistent structural gender gap among AI professionals, with well differentiated career trajectories taken by men and women in today’s labour market”.

This is particularly relevant for India, which has the second biggest AI talent pool but an employment scenario vastly dominated by men: According to the report, while 78 per cent of India’s AI professionals are men, 22 per cent are women.

India has much work to do, or else, the report warns, its disparity will continue to “entrench and deepen gender gaps”, making it all the more difficult to climb the ranks.

 

[Pakistani Fighter]

in my medical college there is this fun physcal test that we get to do in one of the classes.... the record set was by an american girl 20 years back... still unbroken...
women can just as strong if not more than men... especially when they don't have to worry about dangling gemstones like us xD

also your argument doesn't make sense because in conflicts like in vietnam or bangladesh... women were huge part of combat

Lol

to make a prosperous 21st century women must be part of the workforce in all fields

No. They should'nt be

 

[Bilal9]

Empowering women and giving them employment (equal pay as well) reduces fertility rate, brings population growth under control, reduces child mortality and has many many other benefits. Bangladesh currently has the lowest population growth in the subcontinent (BJP propaganda and lies to the contrary) and this is in no small way owes its success to empowering and employment of women. See below.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Bangladesh is better off than India, not a poor, backward neighbour anymore
PRIYAMVADA GROVER Updated: 11 October, 2018 2:54 pm IST

The city of Dhaka | Commons
Text Size:

• 22.6K
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Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971, registering impressive performance on economic and social indicators.

New Delhi: India, the fastest growing major economy, is seen as the powerhouse of South Asia, but this may soon change.

Having already stolen a march over India on key social indices, small neighbour Bangladesh is now on the verge of establishing a lead on the economic front too.

According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Bangladesh is expected to post a growth rate of 7.5 per cent in 2018-19 against the 7.3 per cent projected for India.

India’s eastern neighbour saw a GDP growth of 7.28 per cent in the last financial year, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), while India grew at 7.1 per cent.

The country’s per capita income is also growing at a pace three times India’s: According to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development figures cited in a Dhaka Tribune report, while India’s per capita income rose by 13.8 per cent between 2013 and 2016, Bangladesh’s grew by 39 per cent.

According to some estimates, if the country continues to keep up its gross national income (GNI) and GDP growth at the same pace for the next two years, it will overtake India’s per capita income by 2020.

Also read: Behind Rupee meltdown: India’s exports disaster under Modi Govt

A long journey
Formed from the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971.

The country’s GDP growth rate in 1972 was recorded at negative 14 per cent. Two years later, Bangladesh was steaming ahead with a growth rate of 9.6 per cent when a catastrophic famine, which killed an estimated 1.5 million people, brought the country on its knees again. The ensuing economic crash saw the GDP growth rate slip to a negative 4 per cent.

Inforgraphic by Arindam Mukherjee/ ThePrint
After the famine, the government started redeveloping the country with the help of international relief funds. NGOs also stepped up, and the introduction of high-yielding rice and wheat in the 1970s started to boost agricultural growth.

The country’s robust position today can partly be attributed to its stellar micro-credit system, which began to take root in the 1980s and stands as a model for developing economies. And then there is the fact that the government has been known to focus on women empowerment and prioritise health and education.

Talking to ThePrint, Jayshree Sengupta, economist and senior fellow at Observer Research Foundation (ORF), said the economic surge could be traced to growth in private sector investment and remittances from Bangladeshis abroad.

Exports, especially from Bangladesh’s burgeoning readymade garment industry, have played a massive role too.

Bangladesh is a labour-intensive country like India. However, it does not have strict labour laws like India does.

In 1947, before Independence, India passed the Industrial Disputes Act, which put in place a mechanism for the resolution of conflict that recognises the rights of employers as well as workers.

This law was inherited by Pakistan as well, but the country’s military regime repealed the law from what was then East Pakistan in 1958 following differences with trade unions.

Thus, when Bangladesh separated from Pakistan, it did not have the law.

This helped Bangladesh establish itself as a hub for cheap labour, and a base for its booming manufacturing industry.

The garment industry in Bangladesh is one of the strongest drivers of the economy, having given employment to almost 2.7 per cent (44 lakh) of the country’s 16.3 crore people. Nearly 70 per cent (30 lakh) of these are women.

China’s retreat from low-end manufacturing has helped cement Bangladesh’s position in the sector, and the country has been wooing global investors with its cheap work force.

India today
In India, high oil prices, weak exports and depreciation of the rupee due to a slowdown in capital flows have impacted the economy. Just this week, the rupee, Asia’s worst performing currency this year, fell to a historic low of 74/$ Monday.

“We saw an 8.2 per cent economic growth rate in the first quarter of this fiscal and that was largely due to the base effect of the previous year,” Abhijit Sen Gupta, a senior economics officer at ADB, told The Print. “In the next quarters, we are likely to see a sort of slowing down of growth.”

According to Sen Gupta, if India wants to keep up with its neighbour, it should focus on reducing bottlenecks in sectors such as infrastructure, manufacturing, services and exports, which are critical to quality job creation.

“The export engine, along with investment, needs to be fired to sustain high growth rate,” he said.

Social strides
Bangladesh has also made significant strides vis-à-vis social development indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and gender parity.

In a study on ‘human capital’ published in the medical journal The Lancet, India ranked a notch below Bangladesh.

The study aimed to measure the strength of human capital — described as the level of education and health in a population — in the world’s 195 nations between 1990 and 2016. The parameters included years lived, functional health status and educational leaning.

According to the World Bank, in 2017, Bangladesh recorded an infant mortality rate of 27, which means that these many children died on average within the first year for every 1,000 live births. For India, the rate was 32.

The average life expectancy for an individual in Bangladesh is 72.58 years, against 68.8 years in India.

What’s helped Bangladesh
Experts say that Bangladesh owes much of this progress to efforts made by non-government organisations like Grameen Bank and BRAC.

Grameen Bank, for one, is a globally renowned microfinance initiative that earned its founder Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Peace Prize and inspired replicas in more than 100 countries.

The initiative aims at poverty alleviation by giving loans to small-scale entrepreneurs who do not qualify to receive traditional bank loans. According to the bank’s website, it has “grown to provide collateral-free loans to 7.5 million clients…97 per cent of whom are women”.

This has helped boost financial inclusion in the country. According to World Bank data, 34.1 per cent of Bangladeshi adults with bank accounts made digital transactions in 2017, against the average of 28.8 per cent for South Asia.

Also read: India is the 12th worst country for gender disparity in labour force

Although Bangladesh’s health expenditure as a share of GDP is still lower than India’s, several initiatives taken by the government have helped boost education and women empowerment.

The government has made primary education free and compulsory, giving girl students stipends and scholarships for their entire school education. The government has a strong social safety net for women with initiatives such as four to six months of paid maternity leave, and allowances for divorced and destitute women.

Women now make up nearly 70 per cent of Bangladesh’s garment industry and over 60 per cent of fish farmers.

Bangladesh has set an example for developing economies with its women empowerment initiatives, with the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranking the country number one in gender equality among south Asian nations in 2017 as well as 2016.

It has also registered an impressive performance on reducing poverty, a parameter on which India has made significant advances as well.

Bangladesh was ranked seventh, a good eight slots ahead of India (15), in the political representation of women on the WEF gender gap index.

This is because 50 of the 350 seats in the Bangladesh parliament, roughly 14 per cent, are reserved for women. Meanwhile, in India, 62 of 543 MPs elected in 2014, or 11 per cent, are women, with a law on reservation yet to see the light of day.

Don’t forget the NGOs
“Bangladesh’s high economic growth can be attributed to the sustained investments that Bangladesh has made in enhancing people’s productive capacities, especially by way of promoting basic health and education,” said development economist Dr A.K. Shivakumar.

“That life expectancy at birth is higher and child mortality lower in Bangladesh today than in India, when it was not so during the early 1990s, is testimony to the better access that Bangladeshis have to basic social services,” he said.

“To an extent,” he added, “the high growth has also been fuelled by the social transformation brought about by the greater freedoms young girls and women enjoy in Bangladesh today.

“The growing employment opportunities for young women in the garment industry, as well as the collectivisation and empowerment of women brought about by the spread of the microfinance movement, has contributed to it as well,” he said.

Also read: India’s software exports are not the answer to the rising oil bill

Experts are also unanimous in crediting NGOs for the turnaround in Bangladesh’s fortunes.

“Non-government organisations have played a critical and complementary role to the state in reducing poverty and in expanding social and economic opportunities for a vast majority of Bangladeshis,” said Shivakumar.

ORF’s Sengupta agreed, even as she expressed scepticism about the government’s role.

“It is not a very nice picture in Bangladesh,” she said. “They have a very authoritarian government which has completely suppressed dissent. Women are working without wages.”

By 2017, Bangladesh was being lauded for becoming almost open-defecation free, a journey India is striving to complete. Between 2003 and 2015, Bangladesh’s open-defecation rates have fallen from 42 per cent to 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Indian government’s sustained fight to make the country open-defecation free with Narendra Modi’s pet ‘Swachh Bharat mission’ began only in 2014.

Under this mission, 76 per cent of India’s villages have been declared open-defecation free as of October 2018. India has taken a leaf out of Bangladesh’s Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) model, introduced in 1999, which focuses more on generating demand for basic indoor toilets than releasing subsidies.

 

[Deathstar]

G

Empowering women and giving them employment (equal pay as well) reduces fertility rate, brings population growth under control, reduces child mortality and has many many other benefits. Bangladesh currently has the lowest population growth in the subcontinent (BJP propaganda and lies to the contrary) and this is in no small way owes its success to empowering and employment of women. See below.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Bangladesh is better off than India, not a poor, backward neighbour anymore
PRIYAMVADA GROVER Updated: 11 October, 2018 2:54 pm IST

The city of Dhaka | Commons
Text Size:

• 22.6K
  Shares

Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971, registering impressive performance on economic and social indicators.

New Delhi: India, the fastest growing major economy, is seen as the powerhouse of South Asia, but this may soon change.

Having already stolen a march over India on key social indices, small neighbour Bangladesh is now on the verge of establishing a lead on the economic front too.

According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Bangladesh is expected to post a growth rate of 7.5 per cent in 2018-19 against the 7.3 per cent projected for India.

India’s eastern neighbour saw a GDP growth of 7.28 per cent in the last financial year, according to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), while India grew at 7.1 per cent.

The country’s per capita income is also growing at a pace three times India’s: According to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development figures cited in a Dhaka Tribune report, while India’s per capita income rose by 13.8 per cent between 2013 and 2016, Bangladesh’s grew by 39 per cent.

According to some estimates, if the country continues to keep up its gross national income (GNI) and GDP growth at the same pace for the next two years, it will overtake India’s per capita income by 2020.

Also read: Behind Rupee meltdown: India’s exports disaster under Modi Govt

A long journey
Formed from the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh has come a long way since its independence in 1971.

The country’s GDP growth rate in 1972 was recorded at negative 14 per cent. Two years later, Bangladesh was steaming ahead with a growth rate of 9.6 per cent when a catastrophic famine, which killed an estimated 1.5 million people, brought the country on its knees again. The ensuing economic crash saw the GDP growth rate slip to a negative 4 per cent.

Inforgraphic by Arindam Mukherjee/ ThePrint
After the famine, the government started redeveloping the country with the help of international relief funds. NGOs also stepped up, and the introduction of high-yielding rice and wheat in the 1970s started to boost agricultural growth.

The country’s robust position today can partly be attributed to its stellar micro-credit system, which began to take root in the 1980s and stands as a model for developing economies. And then there is the fact that the government has been known to focus on women empowerment and prioritise health and education.

Talking to ThePrint, Jayshree Sengupta, economist and senior fellow at Observer Research Foundation (ORF), said the economic surge could be traced to growth in private sector investment and remittances from Bangladeshis abroad.

Exports, especially from Bangladesh’s burgeoning readymade garment industry, have played a massive role too.

Bangladesh is a labour-intensive country like India. However, it does not have strict labour laws like India does.

In 1947, before Independence, India passed the Industrial Disputes Act, which put in place a mechanism for the resolution of conflict that recognises the rights of employers as well as workers.

This law was inherited by Pakistan as well, but the country’s military regime repealed the law from what was then East Pakistan in 1958 following differences with trade unions.

Thus, when Bangladesh separated from Pakistan, it did not have the law.

This helped Bangladesh establish itself as a hub for cheap labour, and a base for its booming manufacturing industry.

The garment industry in Bangladesh is one of the strongest drivers of the economy, having given employment to almost 2.7 per cent (44 lakh) of the country’s 16.3 crore people. Nearly 70 per cent (30 lakh) of these are women.

China’s retreat from low-end manufacturing has helped cement Bangladesh’s position in the sector, and the country has been wooing global investors with its cheap work force.

India today
In India, high oil prices, weak exports and depreciation of the rupee due to a slowdown in capital flows have impacted the economy. Just this week, the rupee, Asia’s worst performing currency this year, fell to a historic low of 74/$ Monday.

“We saw an 8.2 per cent economic growth rate in the first quarter of this fiscal and that was largely due to the base effect of the previous year,” Abhijit Sen Gupta, a senior economics officer at ADB, told The Print. “In the next quarters, we are likely to see a sort of slowing down of growth.”

According to Sen Gupta, if India wants to keep up with its neighbour, it should focus on reducing bottlenecks in sectors such as infrastructure, manufacturing, services and exports, which are critical to quality job creation.

“The export engine, along with investment, needs to be fired to sustain high growth rate,” he said.

Social strides
Bangladesh has also made significant strides vis-à-vis social development indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and gender parity.

In a study on ‘human capital’ published in the medical journal The Lancet, India ranked a notch below Bangladesh.

The study aimed to measure the strength of human capital — described as the level of education and health in a population — in the world’s 195 nations between 1990 and 2016. The parameters included years lived, functional health status and educational leaning.

According to the World Bank, in 2017, Bangladesh recorded an infant mortality rate of 27, which means that these many children died on average within the first year for every 1,000 live births. For India, the rate was 32.

The average life expectancy for an individual in Bangladesh is 72.58 years, against 68.8 years in India.

What’s helped Bangladesh
Experts say that Bangladesh owes much of this progress to efforts made by non-government organisations like Grameen Bank and BRAC.

Grameen Bank, for one, is a globally renowned microfinance initiative that earned its founder Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Peace Prize and inspired replicas in more than 100 countries.

The initiative aims at poverty alleviation by giving loans to small-scale entrepreneurs who do not qualify to receive traditional bank loans. According to the bank’s website, it has “grown to provide collateral-free loans to 7.5 million clients…97 per cent of whom are women”.

This has helped boost financial inclusion in the country. According to World Bank data, 34.1 per cent of Bangladeshi adults with bank accounts made digital transactions in 2017, against the average of 28.8 per cent for South Asia.

Also read: India is the 12th worst country for gender disparity in labour force

Although Bangladesh’s health expenditure as a share of GDP is still lower than India’s, several initiatives taken by the government have helped boost education and women empowerment.

The government has made primary education free and compulsory, giving girl students stipends and scholarships for their entire school education. The government has a strong social safety net for women with initiatives such as four to six months of paid maternity leave, and allowances for divorced and destitute women.

Women now make up nearly 70 per cent of Bangladesh’s garment industry and over 60 per cent of fish farmers.

Bangladesh has set an example for developing economies with its women empowerment initiatives, with the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranking the country number one in gender equality among south Asian nations in 2017 as well as 2016.

It has also registered an impressive performance on reducing poverty, a parameter on which India has made significant advances as well.

Bangladesh was ranked seventh, a good eight slots ahead of India (15), in the political representation of women on the WEF gender gap index.

This is because 50 of the 350 seats in the Bangladesh parliament, roughly 14 per cent, are reserved for women. Meanwhile, in India, 62 of 543 MPs elected in 2014, or 11 per cent, are women, with a law on reservation yet to see the light of day.

Don’t forget the NGOs
“Bangladesh’s high economic growth can be attributed to the sustained investments that Bangladesh has made in enhancing people’s productive capacities, especially by way of promoting basic health and education,” said development economist Dr A.K. Shivakumar.

“That life expectancy at birth is higher and child mortality lower in Bangladesh today than in India, when it was not so during the early 1990s, is testimony to the better access that Bangladeshis have to basic social services,” he said.

“To an extent,” he added, “the high growth has also been fuelled by the social transformation brought about by the greater freedoms young girls and women enjoy in Bangladesh today.

“The growing employment opportunities for young women in the garment industry, as well as the collectivisation and empowerment of women brought about by the spread of the microfinance movement, has contributed to it as well,” he said.

Also read: India’s software exports are not the answer to the rising oil bill

Experts are also unanimous in crediting NGOs for the turnaround in Bangladesh’s fortunes.

“Non-government organisations have played a critical and complementary role to the state in reducing poverty and in expanding social and economic opportunities for a vast majority of Bangladeshis,” said Shivakumar.

ORF’s Sengupta agreed, even as she expressed scepticism about the government’s role.

“It is not a very nice picture in Bangladesh,” she said. “They have a very authoritarian government which has completely suppressed dissent. Women are working without wages.”

By 2017, Bangladesh was being lauded for becoming almost open-defecation free, a journey India is striving to complete. Between 2003 and 2015, Bangladesh’s open-defecation rates have fallen from 42 per cent to 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Indian government’s sustained fight to make the country open-defecation free with Narendra Modi’s pet ‘Swachh Bharat mission’ began only in 2014.

Under this mission, 76 per cent of India’s villages have been declared open-defecation free as of October 2018. India has taken a leaf out of Bangladesh’s Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) model, introduced in 1999, which focuses more on generating demand for basic indoor toilets than releasing subsidies.

Good job Bangladesh ,progressing faster than India and Pakistan , i hope India also continues to improve quickly , India has to work a lot on improving social indicators , health and sanitation , LPG connections to all women , home for all till 2022 , double farmers income in 2022 etc are some of our initiatives , lets see what will be our success in it

 

[Nilgiri]

Me: BD "data" is cocooned, faulty and worthless

The homo: *Autistically posts more reports using said BD govt data*

Just

What's next you gonna post some global sob index using BD govt genocide data of "3 million"? - given same kind of claim by same kind of people for the same kind of reason?

That's just about what you are doing here. No one gives a crap what North Korea says its stats are internally either...they are fully compromised credibility country. BD same phenomenon, scale is slightly different that's it.

NO ONE visits your country (to check on and report the reality) and you lot do so BADLY when you leave your swamp and arrive elsewhere. Actually those two things are tied together somewhat.

In the end it just means dissonance peaks and credibility valleys.

 

[UKBengali]

Me: BD "data" is cocooned, faulty and worthless

The homo: *Autistically posts more reports using said BD govt data*

Just

What's next you gonna post some global sob index using BD govt genocide data of "3 million"? - given same kind of claim by same kind of people for the same kind of reason?

That's just about what you are doing here. No one gives a crap what North Korea says its stats are internally either...they are fully compromised credibility country. BD same phenomenon, scale is slightly different that's it.

NO ONE visits your country (to check on and report the reality) and you lot do so BADLY when you leave your swamp and arrive elsewhere. Actually those two things are tied together somewhat.

In the end it just means dissonance peaks and credibility valleys.

Dude, major orgs like UN, IMF and ADB are credible, you are not.

While BD has a long long way to go, it has surpassed India in some indicators like life expectancy and child mortality.

Let us stop the mudslinging and get back to some productive discussions like why India has worse life expectancy than BD, 69 years versus 73 years for BD, despite being around 60% ahead in GDP per capita.
A productive discussion on this would come up with information that could be very interesting.

 

[Nilgiri]

Dude, major orgs like UN, IMF and ADB are credible, you are not.

They dont go do the data acquisition themselves....they just publish what the govt says and people can decide for themselves if its credible. Its precisely why Cuba isnt taken as seriously as Switzerland...whatever the official govt data that UN has to use states on paper.

You telling me they go to each little african country and check everything is done right? Same thing in operation with BD, a country that rigs its elections and has the 3 million sob fantasy complex from its foundation...that it prosecutes its own people with lol.

In the end the terrible dissonant quality of BD people outside BD ( bad education, bad income, bad socio-economics incl fertility rate +woman employment way out of line with what BD claims inside its swamp)...and fact no one visits BD to vet/check stuff for themselves speaks volumes more to people forming the reality of BD....just like they do with other countries that rig elections, control monolith narratives and have next to no visitors (the 21st century banana republics).

Not to mention BD deliberately keeping itself away from standards (like SDDS) that would fact check its nonsense big time....and BD seems to love ending inconveniently large sample size surveys as well (since they start to drift towards more reality).

Its fine, the bigger the bubble, the biggest the burst (or at best sustained mediocrity)....just like the real household income decline popping up now...and BBS not even discussing/disputing it, hoping less talk = more ppl ignore it.

How many people even visit BD nowadays to judge for themselves and provide some semblance of feedback? Is it back up to 100k yet?

 

[Black_cats]

They dont go do the data acquisition themselves....they just publish what the govt says and people can decide for themselves if its credible. Its precisely why Cuba isnt taken as seriously as Switzerland...whatever the official govt data that UN has to use states on paper.

You telling me they go to each little african country and check everything is done right? Same thing in operation with BD, a country that rigs its elections and has the 3 million sob fantasy complex from its foundation...that it prosecutes its own people with lol.

In the end the terrible dissonant quality of BD people outside BD ( bad education, bad income, bad socio-economics incl fertility rate +woman employment way out of line with what BD claims inside its swamp)...and fact no one visits BD to vet/check stuff for themselves speaks volumes more to people forming the reality of BD....just like they do with other countries that rig elections, control monolith narratives and have next to no visitors (the 21st century banana republics).

Not to mention BD deliberately keeping itself away from standards (like SDDS) that would fact check its nonsense big time....and BD seems to love ending inconveniently large sample size surveys as well (since they start to drift towards more reality).

Its fine, the bigger the bubble, the biggest the burst (or at best sustained mediocrity)....just like the real household income decline popping up now...and BBS not even discussing/disputing it, hoping less talk = more ppl ignore it.

How many people even visit BD nowadays to judge for themselves and provide some semblance of feedback? Is it back up to 100k yet?

Instead of talking about Bangladesh look at official stats provided by India and how much sh!thole it is compared with Bangladesh based on that data.

No one will force you to believe anything when all international organizations accepted it. Go try to improve the condition of the sh!t hole India instead of blabbering same thing again and again about Bangladesh.

 

[Nilgiri]

look at official stats

India is actually much more accountable to its people and has credible elections...and actually has some media competition/debate on narratives and institutions.

There is a reason we dont rank in the bottom 10% percentile of corruption like the truest prime shitholes with glorious autocrat 95% win election results lol....producing people that cry and bitch when you simply post a picture of their leader looking like a simian lol @Imran Khan . You can't make this up lol: https://defence.pk/pdf/members/webmaster.177270/ (Scroll halfway down, this is AFTER he tagged mods multiple times and got bitch slapped and ignored by them lol)

Complaining about this haha: https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/paki...ks-on-bangabandhu.601559/page-2#post-11166152

all thru the thread like a stupid little princess haha tagging mods...ignored by them.....yet whines to webby profile page anyway. Cries even more when Waz thumbs up my replies lol.

After all its the same ppl that struggle to earn better than Haitians and Afghans even when they are in the US.....and reproduce at rates worse than anyone else in UK and completely mistreat and oppress their womenfolk (looking at their labour participation rate anywhere thats credible outside the original swamp)...and then act all surprised and innocuous when facebook vids show the reality on the streets of the swamp (BCL fun) and when one burned to death student slips past the BAL suppression regardless.

BD so credible, so honest, so STRONK! Believe every number without question! We dominate our 170 million groupthink serfs, so just submit to the POWER too!

Then scream waissist when you simply question 3 million fakery...and ask is a govt that preaches that as unquestionable truth...really credible on anything else it claims numbers wise?...when we have all this reality of actual performance of Bangladeshis in US, Canada and UK saying otherwise? Not to mention what you actually can sell and buy from the world (again that nasty reality check of 3rd party arises).

Your tears are so funny, please cry more.

@OsmanAli98 @Mentee @M.AsfandYar @Aung Zaya @I.R.A @Tps43 @Game.Invade @N.Siddiqui @Desert Fox @Major Sam @Fledgingwings @Pakhtoon yum @CHACHA"G"

Like seriously, here's a thought....BECOME something worthwhile and credible before posturing your numbers that you concoct and charge headlong believing in your own BS....it likely could just be imaginary windmills after all going by precedence of your own foundation narrative "numbers".

 

[Black_cats]

India is actually much more accountable to its people and has credible elections...and actually has some media competition/debate on narratives and institutions.

There is a reason we dont rank in the bottom 10% percentile of corruption like the truest prime shitholes with glorious autocrat 95% win election results lol....producing people that cry and bitch when you simply post a picture of their leader looking like a simian lol @Imran Khan . You can't make this up lol: https://defence.pk/pdf/members/webmaster.177270/ (Scroll halfway down, this is AFTER he tagged mods multiple times and got bitch slapped and ignored by them lol)

Complaining about this haha: https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/paki...ks-on-bangabandhu.601559/page-2#post-11166152

all thru the thread like a stupid little princess haha tagging mods...ignored by them.....yet whines to webby profile page anyway. Cries even more when Waz thumbs up my replies lol.

After all its the same ppl that struggle to earn better than Haitians and Afghans even when they are in the US.....and reproduce at rates worse than anyone else in UK and completely mistreat and oppress their womenfolk (looking at their labour participation rate anywhere thats credible outside the original swamp)...and then act all surprised and innocuous when facebook vids show the reality on the streets of the swamp (BCL fun) and when one burned to death student slips past the BAL suppression regardless.

BD so credible, so honest, so STRONK! Believe every number without question! We dominate our 170 million groupthink serfs, so just submit to the POWER too!

Then scream waissist when you simply question 3 million fakery...and ask is a govt that preaches that as unquestionable truth...really credible on anything else it claims numbers wise?...when we have all this reality of actual performance of Bangladeshis in US, Canada and UK saying otherwise? Not to mention what you actually can sell and buy from the world (again that nasty reality check of 3rd party arises).

Your tears are so funny, please cry more.

@OsmanAli98 @Mentee @M.AsfandYar @Aung Zaya @I.R.A @Tps43 @Game.Invade @N.Siddiqui @Desert Fox @Major Sam @Fledgingwings @Pakhtoon yum @CHACHA"G"

Like seriously, here's a thought....BECOME something worthwhile and credible before posturing your numbers that you concoct and charge headlong believing in your own BS....it likely could just be imaginary windmills after all going by precedence of your own foundation narrative "numbers".

Even with that comes as one of the bottom of the list which is no where close to Bangladesh’s position 48th, second highest in Asia if I am not mistaken.

 

[Nilgiri]

Even with that comes as one of the bottom of the list which is no where close to Bangladesh’s position 48th, second highest in Asia if I am not mistaken.

Yah you are apparently even better than US on it lol. Who woulda thought that looking at BD people literally in the US, UK and canada lol (their socioeconomic data and any actual real life personal interaction ppl have with them in any large number). But suddenly its a whole new magical world back in 95% win BAL-desh lol...totally different from BD people outside (and then sometimes explained away as "sylhetis suck")

Just like if BD wants to surpass holocaust number, why not, why stop at 3 million? Make it 6 million and 10 million as your feelings desire...the sky is the limit! Prosecute internal dissent judiciously on that too, label all ppl that question it outside as waissist too.

End result: no one that matters honestly cares/believes....and more threads about BIG ALLY announcements/actions for rohingya comes in each week lol along with BD superpower threads and acquisition multi page threads and BD 2030 planz!.

All the while, the real people of BD suffer under real household income decline....and can't even get politicians to compete against each other to try deliver on things...and market cap just took a tumble and forex level already stagnating this early.

Then everyone acts super proud of the autocrat corruption level.....and they are super believable whatever they say about whatever number....because it all helps to deflect from the reality.

Then you complain about your precious above-reproach leaders being shown as monkey pics lol. Like seriously?

Become credible first, rather than desperately craving it, not getting it, and then crying about it.

 

[Black_cats]

Yah you are apparently even better than US on it lol. Who woulda thought that looking at BD people literally in the US, UK and canada lol (their socioeconomic data and any actual real life personal interaction ppl have with them in any large number). But suddenly its a whole new magical world back in 95% win BAL-desh lol...totally different from BD people outside (and then sometimes explained away as "sylhetis suck")

Just like if BD wants to surpass holocaust number, why not, why stop at 3 million? Make it 6 million and 10 million as your feelings desire...the sky is the limit! Prosecute internal dissent judiciously on that too, label all ppl that question it outside as waissist too.

End result: no one that matters honestly cares/believes....and more threads about BIG ALLY announcements/actions for rohingya comes in each week lol along with BD superpower threads and acquisition multi page threads and BD 2030 planz!.

All the while, the real people of BD suffer under real household income decline....and can't even get politicians to compete against each other to try deliver on things...and market cap just took a tumble and forex level already stagnating this early.

Then everyone acts super proud of the autocrat corruption level.....and they are super believable whatever they say about whatever number....because it all helps to deflect from the reality.

Then you complain about your precious above-reproach leaders being shown as monkey pics lol. Like seriously?

Become credible first, rather than desperately craving it, not getting it, and then crying about it.

Again epic fail!! The rank has nothing to do with vote rigging that BAL did. It is open secret but the woman empowerment. Bangladesh is recognized by the whole world the work that is done by NGOs to improve the life style of the woman. For example Dr. Younus’s Grameen Bank itself has around 10 million or member. For that he got noble peace prize. BRAC is worlds largest NGO. Two female PMs also played big role here. They made education free upto HSC level for females, empowered woman, created job opportunities for them, RMG helped them as well, many went abroad to earn money, controlled population growth with mass education at grassroots level, created tough law for Eve teasing and for harassment or rape for woman and the list can go on and on. India is no where close to these developments that happened to woman of Bangladesh.

It’s mostly happened due to work by private NGOs. Outcome is infront of everyone to see.

Instead of having but* hurt on success of Bangladesh go and try to improve condition of females of India.

 

[Imran Khan]

India is actually much more accountable to its people and has credible elections...and actually has some media competition/debate on narratives and institutions.

There is a reason we dont rank in the bottom 10% percentile of corruption like the truest prime shitholes with glorious autocrat 95% win election results lol....producing people that cry and bitch when you simply post a picture of their leader looking like a simian lol @Imran Khan . You can't make this up lol: https://defence.pk/pdf/members/webmaster.177270/ (Scroll halfway down, this is AFTER he tagged mods multiple times and got bitch slapped and ignored by them lol)

Complaining about this haha: https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/paki...ks-on-bangabandhu.601559/page-2#post-11166152

all thru the thread like a stupid little princess haha tagging mods...ignored by them.....yet whines to webby profile page anyway. Cries even more when Waz thumbs up my replies lol.

After all its the same ppl that struggle to earn better than Haitians and Afghans even when they are in the US.....and reproduce at rates worse than anyone else in UK and completely mistreat and oppress their womenfolk (looking at their labour participation rate anywhere thats credible outside the original swamp)...and then act all surprised and innocuous when facebook vids show the reality on the streets of the swamp (BCL fun) and when one burned to death student slips past the BAL suppression regardless.

BD so credible, so honest, so STRONK! Believe every number without question! We dominate our 170 million groupthink serfs, so just submit to the POWER too!

Then scream waissist when you simply question 3 million fakery...and ask is a govt that preaches that as unquestionable truth...really credible on anything else it claims numbers wise?...when we have all this reality of actual performance of Bangladeshis in US, Canada and UK saying otherwise? Not to mention what you actually can sell and buy from the world (again that nasty reality check of 3rd party arises).

Your tears are so funny, please cry more.

@OsmanAli98 @Mentee @M.AsfandYar @Aung Zaya @I.R.A @Tps43 @Game.Invade @N.Siddiqui @Desert Fox @Major Sam @Fledgingwings @Pakhtoon yum @CHACHA"G"

Like seriously, here's a thought....BECOME something worthwhile and credible before posturing your numbers that you concoct and charge headlong believing in your own BS....it likely could just be imaginary windmills after all going by precedence of your own foundation narrative "numbers".

bhai main ne inko in ke hall per chor diya hai ye log kisi or hi bramaandh main ji rahy hain

 

[Bilal9]

Instead of talking about Bangladesh look at official stats provided by India and how much sh!thole it is compared with Bangladesh based on that data.

No one will force you to believe anything when all international organizations accepted it. Go try to improve the condition of the sh!t hole India instead of blabbering same thing again and again about Bangladesh.

Don't pay any heed to the lunatic ramblings of this a$$-kisser in this forum and his a$$-kissee friends. How many times he got banned now?

Yeah don't believe the WEF, believe the dharmic economists cooking up numbers....

Again epic fail!! The rank has nothing to do with vote rigging that BAL did. It is open secret but the woman empowerment. Bangladesh is recognized by the whole world the work that is done by NGOs to improve the life style of the woman. For example Dr. Younus’s Grameen Bank itself has around 10 million or member. For that he got noble peace prize. BRAC is worlds largest NGO. Two female PMs also played big role here. They made education free upto HSC level for females, empowered woman, created job opportunities for them, RMG helped them as well, many went abroad to earn money, controlled population growth with mass education at grassroots level, created tough law for Eve teasing and for harassment or rape for woman and the list can go on and on. India is no where close to these developments that happened to woman of Bangladesh.

It’s mostly happened due to work by private NGOs. Outcome is infront of everyone to see.

Instead of having but* hurt on success of Bangladesh go and try to improve condition of females of India.

So much easier to troll and change the subject, no use discussing on point with facts, data and logic.

These guys don't have an inkling on what took in the last three decades social change-wise to get here, nor do they want to know. Let them be where they are. I am sure Pakistani and Indian economists and social science folks know. And that is good enough...