A child climbs on a royal poinciana tree to pluck new blossoms on Earth Day, April 22, 2020, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (CNS/Reuters/Mohammad Ponir Hossain)
Dhaka, Bangladesh Titu Gain, who lives in Satkhira, in southern Bangladesh, knows firsthand how deadly and dangerous a cyclone can be. Almost every year, cyclones damage my house, said the 55-year-old Catholic father of three. I lost my brother during a cyclone in 2007, a year when storms killed more than 3,000 people.
Like almost all of his neighbors, Gain is a farmer who also works as a day laborer to make ends meet. The region is known for producing prawns and mangoes, but its location on the coast makes it especially vulnerable to storms.
MFS industry swells riding on low-income groups
Cash-out charge unchanged since 2011
Mobile financial services have gained immense popularity in Bangladesh, particularly among lower-income groups, but the charge to withdraw funds has remained almost unchanged since the inception of the digital platform in 2011.
As a result, most clients have to fork out Tk 18.50 to withdraw Tk 1,000 from their accounts. It was the same when the service was rolled out.
Although some MFS providers have recently slashed the charge to Tk 14, users and analysts say the rate is still higher, and a further reduction will benefit the poor, who avail the money withdrawal service through mobile phones most.
Eliminating Poverty in Post-Pandemic World
Dr. Ranjan Roy
Ending poverty (SDG-1) is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Globally, about 150 million people are living in extreme poverty, that is, living on less than $1.90 a day. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, global extreme poverty has increased in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years. Poverty is the inability of fulfilling the most basic needs such as health, education, and access to water and sanitation, the UN expresses.
The World Bank estimates, poverty reduction strategies have grossly been slowed down over the last year mainly because of the Covid-19 disruptions, which compound the impacts of natural disaster. In Bangladesh, poverty rate has been increased to double (42 per cent) in December 2020 from 21.6 per cent in 2018 for Covid-19 fallout, according to the survey of the South Asian Network on Economic Modelling (SANEM).
The government project undertaken to prepare the country s first-ever poverty registry has not been completed in more than seven years, with the data collected for it already rendered useless.
The National Household Database (NHD), initially known as the Bangladesh Poverty Database, is meant to help streamline the beneficiary selection process for social safety net programmes by gathering socioeconomic data of each household in the country.
Implemented in collaboration between the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the Department of Disaster Management (DDM), the project beginning in 2013 was supposed to be completed by 2017.
But the Tk 328 crore project, financed by the government and the World Bank, saw its deadline pushed to June 2021 and cost balloon to Tk 727 crore.
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