Reducing gap between rich and poor in Bangladesh

SALEEM SAMAD

The gap between the rich and the poor is perpetuating and has enlarged alarmingly, despite a decline in the rate of poverty in recent times before the pandemic hit.

The poverty level dropped to 24.3% in 2016 from 31.5% in 2010, but other indicators which measure income inequality within the population, coupled with slow investment for vulnerable communities, are likely to challenge the achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, according to social scientist AKM Mustaque Ali, an executive director of INCIDIN Bangladesh.

Whenever financial resources are invested to strengthen the capability of the bottom 20%, the local ruling party elites with their nexus of power lobbies eat up the development initiatives, leaving bread-crumbs for the vulnerable.

The vulnerable community must also have access to natural resources, basic education, health care, learning skills, community participation in development planning, and the justice system. The digital divide that exists among the rural poor has also blocked the best practices of good governance, transparency, and zero-tolerance to corruption. 

A lack of access to the justice system has also aggravated social tensions, which challenges the traditions of social harmony and religious freedom in rural areas.

The power lobby, which includes politicians, rent-seekers, and contractors who are responsible for milching the development budget for the poor, end up making the rich richer. Several other factors, including climate change, have expedited rural-urban migration.

Historically, Bangladesh has had inequitable access to land, in a land-scarce country where the per capita cultivated land is limited. Minority elites with an unholy alliance with power lobbies dominate both land and river resources.

“Migration fundamentally challenges our understanding of development,” says Mustaque Ali in an outstanding research report published in “Migration in South Asia: Poverty and Vulnerability” published by Kathmandu based think-tank South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE).

Internal migration is generally linked to population pressure, adverse person to land ratio, landlessness, poverty, natural calamities, law and order, lack of social and cultural spaces, job opportunities, and higher wages. As for the poor, the search for survival is often forced, controlled, and restricted.

Dhaka is the only migration destination for both the rich and the poor in Bangladesh. It’s understood that migration to the Dhaka region is caused by the concentration of economic, administrative, and political institutions in the capital -- thus it continues to attract migrants from other regions.

The present state of the economy of Bangladesh elucidates that economic growth is not a guarantee in cutting down the rate of unemployment. Bangladesh is in a state of jobless growth. Violence and conflict is another risk factor which causes migration.

There is no respite in attacks on minority communities, especially on Hindus and on the indigenous communities, by non-state actors, backed by local leaders. The silent, low-intensity violence against minorities is occurring with impunity, while civil administration and police in most cases do not take cognizance of the attacks.

Only those occurrences which make headlines in the media get the attention of the civil administration and police officers. Seldom have the victims been compensated. Justice remains elusive as perpetrators are released on bail, while judicial proceedings reveal that eye-witnesses have remained away from the court in fear of further reprisal.

Eminent economist Dr Abul Barakat has, in his research, said though, that most of this low-intensity violence is not to be blamed on religious motives -- the only intention was to grab the land, property, and business establishments of minority populations.

Bangladesh needs to enlarge its investment in ensuring the bottom 20% population living in both urban and rural areas are brought under a wider safety net, which most development economists believe will significantly reduce the gap.

First published in the Dhaka Tribune, 24 August 2021

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at <saleemsamad@hotmail.com>; Twitter @saleemsamad

The depths of debt

SALEEM SAMAD

Developing countries such as Bangladesh are struggling to balance fighting Covid-19 and keep up with their growing public debt

The global leaders have realized that the coronavirus crisis has jolted the world from a slumber, to understand that the crisis has unveiled the spectre of a larger global crisis.

The health care crisis and its cascading economic consequences are predicted to further plunge many countries in the developing world into an unprecedented crisis, further pushing millions of people into poverty and starvation.

These conditions shine a strong light on the continuing debt problem that stands in the way of people’s survival -- the fight against inequality, the realization of their human rights, sovereignty and the self-determination of people, economic, gender, and ecological justice, and the pursuit of a dignified life.

Hundreds of international, regional, and civil society organizations (CSOs) including Action Aid, CADTM International, Oxfam, Third World Network, joined by 120 Bangladesh NGOs led by Coast Trust, are demanding to suspend the realization of debt instalments for all public debts of developing countries combating the Covid-19 pandemic so that the ongoing coronavirus crisis is not aggravated.

They call upon world leaders, national governments, and financial institutions both public and private, to take urgent action in compliance with their obligations and responsibilities, and commit to unconditional cancellation of public external debt payments.

The CSOs demanded the suspension of all instalments of public debt for at least the financial year 2020-2021 so that countries can develop the capacity to combat the pandemic and overcome the impact of this disaster on its citizens’ health, food, and economic vulnerabilities.

An international statement issued during Global Week (October 10-17) of action for debt cancellation sought the decisive and full solution to the debt problem as part of the profound transformation of economic and financial systems that the present crises so urgently demand.

Meanwhile, the CSO network appealed to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and other bilateral, regional, and multilateral development financiers of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh’s economy is severely under stress due to the additional burden of pandemic management, while the country has a budget deficit of $17.65 billion in the current financial year.

The CSOs in Bangladesh are trying to urgently bring to global attention that the government of Bangladesh for the current financial year is being forced to allocate $6.20bn for servicing external debts to international financial institutions.

They are urging the multilateral, regional, and bilateral financial institutions to strictly follow the suggestions made by the World Bank and IMF and suspend the servicing of the public debts for 2020, so that the government can use its resources to fund initiatives to help the people in overcoming the Covid-19 challenge.

On the other hand, the G-20 governments announced the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) -- not a cancelation but merely an eight-month delay of up to $12bn worth of payments for public debts.

Much of this debt is illegitimate, the CSO network argues. The international creditors lend irresponsibly and unfairly, driven by predatory lending. The money is used to finance harmful projects and policies, failing to comply with legal and democratic requirements, is saddled with onerous and unjust terms, and incurred by private corporations but assumed by governments or incurred through public guarantees of private profits.

The conditional loans, including cuts in public services and social protection, and severe austerity programs, have also caused as great if not greater harm than debt servicing, especially on women and girls, indigenous people, and the most impoverished and vulnerable people and communities.

CSOs argue that the demand is much more than “debt relief,” but also for “debt justice.”

First published in the Dhaka Tribune on 24 November 2020

Saleem Samad is an independent journalist, media rights defender, and recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He can be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter @saleemsamad

Bangladesh Needs Strong Unions, Not Outside Pressure

FAZLE HASAN ABED

BANGLADESH, my country, is again in tears. Last week in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, the capital, a poorly constructed building that housed garment factories and other businesses collapsed. More than 300 have been confirmed dead, and the final death toll could well exceed 700.

Bangladesh is no stranger to disasters, both natural and man-made. Still, this is one of the saddest chapters since we won our independence in 1971, precisely because the tragedy could easily have been prevented. Structural weaknesses had been found but not fixed. The victims were among the most vulnerable in our society — hardworking people making an honest, but meager, living. Many died manufacturing clothing for Western brands.

I appreciate the unease a Westerner might feel knowing that the clothes on his or her back were stitched together by people working long hours in dangerous conditions. It is natural that people in richer countries are now asking how they can put pressure on Bangladesh and its manufacturers to improve the country’s dismal safety record.

But ceasing the purchase of Bangladeshi-manufactured goods, as some have suggested, would not be the compassionate course of action. Economic opportunities from the garment industry have played an important role in making social change possible in my country, with about three million women now working in the garment sector. I have dedicated my life to alleviating entrenched poverty, and I know that boycotting brands that do business in Bangladesh might only further impoverish those who most need to put food on their tables, since the foreign brands would simply take their manufacturing contracts to other countries.

The rise of manufacturing here has had good effects. In the past, for example, a poor family’s vision for a newborn daughter’s future was often to marry her off as young as possible, since the dowry paid to a husband’s family grows as a daughter gets older. Even after the dowry was outlawed in 1980, the practice continued. A girl would often be married off as young as 13, and would never leave her village, never know a brighter future for herself or her children.

Partly because many women and their daughters now take garment industry jobs — even in factories where workers’ rights are virtually nonexistent — families living in poverty have changed their vision of the future. More have acquired long-term goals, like educating their sons and daughters, saving and taking microloans to start new businesses, and building and maintaining more sanitary living spaces.

Many outsiders think only of calamity when they hear the word Bangladesh — of factory fires, cyclones, floods and poverty. But the true Bangladesh is also the birthplace of microfinance and home to a robust civil society. It has seen rapid gains in living standards: maternal mortality is one-quarter of what it was in 1990; early childhood mortality is one-fifth of what it was in 1980, and we have eliminated the gender gap in primary and secondary school enrollment.

These remarkable gains will mean little if we allow tragedies like the one at Savar to continue. The law must work for everyone, rich and poor, landless laborer and factory owner alike. We must not allow those who benefit from the exploitation of the vulnerable to continue to treat life so cheaply.

What, then, is the solution? The changes must come first from Bangladesh itself. My country will require new political will to hold accountable those who willingly put human lives at such grave risk. It will also require the support of factory owners; civil society organizations, including my own; and the private sector, including Western buyers.

The solutions start with the workers themselves; they must be allowed by their employers to unionize, so they can engage in collective bargaining and hold their employers responsible for basic standards of pay and safety. Their organized power is the only thing that can stand up to the otherwise unaccountable nexus of business owners and politicians, who are often one and the same.

Western buyers, instead of squeezing factory owners on price, should finance better safety standards. The point needs to be made in the marketplace overseas that safety improvements are not so expensive that they can be used as an excuse for raising prices to the consumer. And consumers who are shocked by the working conditions need to realize that a playing field where the price tag is the only standard for a purchase is not a level one when workers’ lives are at stake.

At the same time, the owners themselves cannot be let off the hook, for there is no excuse for criminal negligence. But they cannot be trusted to voluntarily do all that they might. In a country with 100,000 factories in and near the capital, and three million workers in its garment industry, an inspection force numbering 18 people only invites unconscionable lapses on the part of unscrupulous employers. The inspection force must be increased drastically, and it must vigorously enforce safety standards.

The government, finally, must stop neglecting worker safety issues, even as it steps up enforcement. But that will be extremely difficult to accomplish as long as there is an unholy web of employers and politicians colluding to avoid responsibility for criminal negligence; that, in the end, is what trapped thousands of workers in the flimsy factory building that collapsed on them in Savar. Those workers cannot be forgotten until these issues are resolved.

“Made in Bangladesh” should be a mark of pride, not shame. Bangladeshi civil society stands ready to work with the authorities to make this so. In the 1970s, during the early years of my country’s nationhood, Bangladesh was suffused with the energy of the struggle for independence, a yearning for freedom from exploitation. From this energy came microfinance, community health work, and other social innovations that, combined with new economic opportunities in export industries like textiles, have transformed the lives of tens of millions of poor people, particularly women.

Today I grieve with my fellow countrymen, but I also raise my voice to say that this must not continue. As we mourn our losses, let us rekindle that spirit of liberation.

Article first appeared in the New York Times, United States, April 29, 2013

Fazle Hasan Abed, winner of prestigious international awards is the founder and chairman of the antipoverty organization BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.

The Female Factor: Success in a Land Known for Disasters

Photo: Munem Wasif for the International Herald Tribune: Nur Jahan cared for a relative at a hospital. Ms. Jahan worked on a road maintenance crew for two years and hopes to one day run for a local government position.

BETTINA WASSENER

SOMESHPUR, Bangladesh — To many outsiders, Bangladesh is best known for its poverty and the natural disasters that hit it with depressing regularity.

When it comes to the position of women, however, this country has made progress that would be unthinkable in many other Muslim societies. Bangladeshi women have served in U.N. peacekeeping missions. There are women ambassadors, doctors, engineers and pilots. Two powerful women — the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, and her political rival, Khaleda Zia — have been alternating at the country’s helm for years. The proportion of parliamentary seats held by women is 19.7 percent, not much lower than the 22.3 percent in the British House of Commons.

“This is a country where women are active in every field,” Dipu Moni, the minister of foreign affairs, said at her office in Dhaka, the capital. Ms. Moni, the daughter of a prominent politician and a Western-educated lawyer and physician, has campaigned for years for women’s rights and improved health provisions in the country.

Such efforts by successive governments and development organizations have led to major improvements in the lives of women across the country, with expanded access to health care and basic education in rural and urban areas. Decades of microlending and, more recently, the burgeoning garment sector have underpinned the progress by turning millions of women into breadwinners for their families.

Nur Jahan, who lives in Someshpur, a ramshackle village of about 1,000 people four hours from Dhaka, illustrates how tough life remains for many Bangladeshi women, but also how many women’s lives are transforming.

Ms. Jahan’s husband abandoned her, penniless and in rags, on the main square of Someshpur when she was pregnant with her second child about 10 years ago. A compact and vivacious woman who is about 26 years old — no one keeps exact records — Ms. Jahan spent years doing odd jobs for other households to keep herself and her children above water. In a country that ranks as one of the poorest in the world, she was about as low as it is possible to get.

Then, two years ago, luck finally arrived, in the form of a development project that arranged for women who had been widowed or left by their husbands to get jobs maintaining roads in the vicinity.

The project, funded by the European Union and the U.N. Development Program, and implemented with the assistance of local governments, helped about 24,400 women like Ms. Jahan across Bangladesh.

For two years, they cleared shrubs and smoothed surfaces. They were paid 100 taka, or about $1.20, a day. But the savings they accumulated allowed many of them to buy a plot of land or a humble dwelling. In addition, they were taught to start tiny businesses that should allow them to make a living going forward.

Ms. Jahan now makes and sells compost, and trades dried fish. Others in the village sell wood, cookies or stationery for a slim profit. One became the proud owner of a hand loom. Instead of being destitute, these women are now merely poor. They can afford to eat and to send their children to school.

Ms. Jahan hopes to run for a local government position in a few years. Already, people come to her for help, she explained proudly. Recently, the relatives of a sick neighbor asked her to accompany them to the local clinic. Before, they would have hardly looked at her.

“When I think about my past, I want to cry,” she said. “When I think about life now, it is nothing but smiles.”

The roots of much of the development work were laid in the aftermath of the Bangladeshi war for independence from Pakistan in 1971. What started off as efforts to support the tens of thousands of women who were widowed during the fighting was later expanded into much wider efforts to alleviate poverty and facilitate women’s empowerment, said Ferdousi Sultana Begum, senior social development officer at the Asian Development Bank in Dhaka.

“There is still a long way to go, but there has been a lot of gradual progress, especially over the past two decades,” she said. Girls’ education, in particular, has been embraced widely, she added.

Statistics, too, underline the improvement in women’s lives. The number of births by teenage mothers, for example, plummeted to 78.9 per 1,000 in 2010 from 130.5 in 2000. That is still high by Western standards (the figure for the United States is 41.2), but it is below the 86.3 recorded in India.

Fewer babies die in Bangladesh than in India: 52 out of 1,000, compared with 66 in India and 87 in Pakistan.

And population growth has been stemmed. In the late 1980s, women in Bangladesh had on average 5.1 children. By 2009, the rate had been more than halved, to 2.3. India has a rate of 2.7, according to the World Bank.

The progress comes despite the toughest of backdrops. Over all, Bangladesh ranks 146th of 187 countries on an index measuring human development compiled by the U.N. Development Program — ahead of Myanmar and many African countries but behind Iraq. Nearly one-third of the population lives in poverty. Corruption, red tape and poor infrastructure mar everyday life. Access to clean water and electricity is scarce in the villages that dot the flat landscape of the country, whose 160 million inhabitants squeeze into an area smaller than Florida and larger than Greece.

Conservative traditions are deeply enshrined in this country, where about 70 percent of the population lives in the countryside. There are frequent reports of domestic violence, often related to demands for dowry payments. And many women who have achieved top leadership positions owe their prominence in part to powerful male relatives.

But while women in many other Muslim nations are seeing their rights eroded by the rise of conservative Islamism, this is not the case in Bangladesh. Extremism is a fringe phenomenon, and women’s development projects encounter little religious opposition.

The country is predominantly Muslim, but moderate; Buddhist and Hindu traditions are widely respected, and there is a widespread acceptance of the concept that women can work outside the home.

Microlending, which took off in the 1980s, has allowed many women to start tiny businesses over the years.

More recently, millions of people have found work in the garment sector, which accounts for about three-quarters of exports from Bangladesh.

At the Mustafa Garments Industries factory in the southeastern port city of Chittagong, hundreds of women, most in their 20s and early 30s, were recently bent over sewing machines and cutting tables, making shorts for customers in the United States and Europe.

The factory employs about 500 people — 95 percent of them women — who earn between 4,500 and 5,000 taka a month, according to Kallol Majumder, the general manager. That is about $2 a day — but even that gives them breadwinner status. And it underlines the fact that women in Bangladesh are not simply recipients of Western charity, but active economic agents in their own right.

“Bangladesh is undergoing a structural change in the economy, from agricultural to manufacturing,” said Stefan Priesner, the U.N. Development Program country director in Dhaka. “Women have played a huge role in this.”

On the education front, men still outnumber women in universities. But the number of women enrolling has risen steadily. In an attempt to help redress the balance, a women-only university was set up in Chittagong in 2008.

Kamal Ahmad, a Bangladeshi who worked for many years in development organizations and as a lawyer in the United States and Britain, spent years raising donations and lobbying the government for land for the university. The goal for the Asian University for Women, he said, is to create women leaders capable of bringing about change across Asia.

The first class is expected to graduate next year, and many of the students already have plans to set up businesses, campaign groups, banks or schools in their 12 respective home countries.

“I have a real responsibility to help social progress,” said Moumita Basak, a bubbly 21-year-old from Chittagong. Her goal: to become a writer, and set up organizations aimed at promoting social causes.

First published in The New York Times, New York, USA, April 9, 2012