Bangladesh making significant progress in poverty reduction: UN report

Bangladesh has made significant progress towards reducing all forms of poverty in the country, according to a new UN report.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) on Thursday published the 2019 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) -- a tool to measure progress against Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1, which aims to end poverty in all its forms and dimension

It compares acute multidimensional poverty across 101 countries and monitors changes over time, based on 10 indicators including health, education, quality of work and standard of living.

According to the study, Bangladesh is among 10 countries with a combined population of 2 billion to have made statistically significant progress towards achieving SDG 1.

The report studied 31 low income, 68 middle income and 2 high income countries and found that 1.3 billion people are 'multidimensionally poor'.

Bangladesh ranks alongside India and Cambodia for making the fastest reductions in poverty across the board, improving its standing in nine of the 10 indicators with poverty falling at the same speed in rural and urban parts of the country.

Over half of the 1.3 billion people identified as poor are children under the age of 18, and around a third are under the age of 10, according to the report.

The vast majority of these children, around 85 per cent, live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

But child poverty has dropped markedly faster than adult poverty in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, India and Peru, the report found.

“Action against poverty is needed in all developing regions”, it said, with Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia containing the largest proportion of poor people -- 84.5 per cent.

It describes the level of inequality in these regions as 'massive'. The disparity in South Asia ranges from 0.8 percent in the Maldives to 55.9 per cent in Afghanistan.

Pakistan and Bangladesh have similar MPI values (0.198), but inequality is higher in Pakistan (variance of 0.023) than in Bangladesh (0.016), the report said.