Acting country head of World Bank (WB) Bangladesh Christine Kimes yesterday said higher education in Bangladesh faces many challenges, including lack of access, low budgetary allocation and absence of a favourable environment for teaching, learning and research.
“Despite Bangladesh’s progress so far, the education authorities have been facing a number of challenges. One such challenge is the lack of access to higher education for many deserving candidates,” she said while addressing a workshop styled “Higher Education Quality Enhancement Project Achievements” at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre in the capital.
“In the last decade, Bangladesh has witnessed a rapid expansion of potential tertiary education students as a result of growing pass rates at the secondary level. Secondary graduates have tripled from a million in 2004-05 to 3 million in 2014, creating huge demand for higher education but the tertiary education enrollment rate is still very low.
“Nevertheless, this low participation rate can be viewed both as a problem and an opportunity as the country can draw many benefits from investment in higher education and skills development,” the World Bank official explained.
She noted that human capital development is an increasingly important strategy for accelerating and sustaining economic development and growth. “As the economy grows and diversifies, the demand for skilled professionals will also grow and higher education institutions will be the focal point for producing such professionals.”
But Finance Minister AMA Muhith said the success achieved in the education sector is satisfactory.
He said Bangladesh has made tremendous progress in the education sector in spite of the small budgetary allocation.
“In the budget for the education sector, we have allocated only one-third of what is recommended by experts and scholars. The allocation is barely 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) while 6% has been recommended. But still what we have achieved in education is significant and something that we can be proud of,” Muhith said.
“We started with 27,000 primary schools but now we have 70,000. The number of universities has gone up while secondary education enrollment has exploded. 35 years ago, there were only 12,000 secondary schools but the number is now 40,000 or more,” the minister said.
“This has been the right investment as it is the success of man. Whatever achievement we have in economic field could not have been possible without investing in manpower,” said the minister.