ARCHIVE 03/03

The Telegraph: Meet the all-female ‘disease detectives’ revitalising their nation’s health

Around 50,000 women provide door-to-door ‘last mile’ services in Bangladesh’s rural areas and slums
In some ways, Selina Khatun is like a detective. The 40-year-old has informants all over the 10 villages under her control in northern Bangladesh’s Mymensingh District, constantly feeding her titbits of vital intelligence.
But Khatun isn’t using her loyal connections to monitor the territory for crime gangs. Instead, she’s on the lookout for one of the greatest threats to women in the South Asian country: treatable disease.

Fashion Network:

Global fashion brand H&M Group has joined the UNFCCC Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action in Bangladesh to discuss key reforms needed for the transformation of the renewable energy market.
The roundtable brought together stakeholders from various sectors, including fashion brands, policymakers, garment manufacturers, experts, renewable energy developers, and financial institutions.

Bangladesh has a lot to be proud of. In December 1971, when Bangladesh gained independence, it was among the world's poorest countries. A devastating war shattered its economy and destroyed its infrastructure.
Fifty years later, the transformation of Bangladesh is remarkable. The country has reduced poverty in record time: between 2000 and 2016, extreme poverty dropped from 34 percent to 13 percent. Since 2000, it has remained among the fastest-growing economies, and in 2015, it crossed the threshold to become a lower middle-income country. GNI per capita rose to over $2,500 in 2021, a 20-fold leap from its 1971 levels. Before 1971, per capita income had not risen for 20 years.

The Bangladesh economy has been showing signs of improvement riding mainly on increased export earnings, the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, widely known as MCCI, said in its economic review for the December quarter of 2022.
The improvement came as the export-oriented garment, leather, plastic, and jute sectors, along with domestic market-oriented steel, food-processing, and transport sectors, have been in full-swing operation, it observed.

In 1971, Bangladesh’s economy was valued at USD 6.2 billion, and for a considerable amount of time after its independence, Bangladesh was seen as a symbol of “poverty and less development.” However, the nation is presently ascending to prosperity and economic brilliance.

ExxonMobil Corporation, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, has expressed interest in exploring gas in all the open deepwater offshore blocks and some onshore blocks using the required two- and three-dimensional seismic surveys.
The company plans to implement the proposal, including production sharing contracts (PSC) negotiation and well exploration, in three phases over six years.

Bangladesh’s foreign minister said companies making “runaway profit” from the war in Ukraine should compensate affected, less developed nations.
The war has had major global economic ramifications, especially for countries like Bangladesh which imports most of its energy sources.
Last year, a United Nations report highlighted the fallout from Ukraine’s war could dramatically worsen the economic outlook for developing countries already grappling with debt financing related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to a World Bank report, in the last 15 years, annual per capita plastic consumption has increased three times in urban areas of Bangladesh.
There is no alternative to sustainable plastic waste management for environmental and economic reasons. Still, proper structure for waste management is not happening. The big solution to this problem can be to ensure sustainable recycling of plastic waste through public and private initiatives.

New Delhi: Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is going to undertake yet another visit to India just months before the tightly fought elections in that country. She will be attending the G20 Summit in September as an ‘Invited Country’.
Dhaka is ‘concerned’ that New Delhi is not giving the required push to a stalled power project signed in 2017 between Adani Power and the Bangladesh Power Development Board.

The economy of Bangladesh is gradually improving.
The development of the garment industry and the increase in expatriate income are playing a major role in the economic development of Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s garment exports in 2020 were around Tk 333,500 crores, which is 7.56 percent of the GDP of that period.
In 2021, the total income received by expatriates in Bangladesh was about Tk 2 lakh 33 thousand 200 crores, which is 5.28 percent of the GDP. In 2022, the amount of expatriate income in the country was Tk 222,600 crore, which is 4.55 percent

of the GDP.

Corrupt politics has become a bigger threat to the country than poverty.
Squeezed on three sides by India and on the fourth by the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most populous country, is both a much-praised model of development and a significant regional economy. Since the brutal war of independence from Pakistan in 1971, it has made remarkable social and economic progress.

As food rationing begins for Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, a top UN-appointed independent rights expert on Thursday urged the international community to step in and reverse the policy as “a matter of life and death”.
“These rations cuts are a stain on the conscience of the international community,” said Tom Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar. “I have spoken with desperate families in the camps who have already had to cut back on essential food items due to a spike in prices. Reversing these cuts in food aid is literally a matter of life and death for Rohingya families.”

Underscoring the significance of the downgrade, former Bangladesh Bank governor Salehuddin Ahmed said, "If this [the downgrade] were for a single bank, it wouldn't have been an issue. But we are talking about the country's entire banking system. Global lenders such as the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and World Bank [WB] will now be more cautious in providing funding.

Shifts in the garment industry, which powered development in the country, represent one risk; meagre currency reserves are another. Yet nothing so imperils Bangladesh’s economic miracle as graft and patronage at the highest levels.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Bangladesh Power Development Board rushed to sign a deal that only allows Adani Power to mint money at every single phase, from coal purchase to electricity export.