To eliminate the poverty gap which can help extreme poor to cross the threshold of the lower poverty line, would require redistribution of only 3% of our total GDP, Dr Wahiduddin Mahmud, economist and former adviser to the caretaker government, said yesterday.
“In 2010, there were 17-18% of people who lived below the extreme poverty line. May be, it would not be possible to eliminate poverty within the next 10 years, but it is possible and feasible to develop the eradication of extreme poverty within the timeframe,” Mahmud said.
Quoting a HIES 2010 household income survey, he said it is achievable.
“It is not a matter of resources, rather a policy and political willingness is needed to achieve it. If we can redistribute only 3% of our GDP for the extreme poor, which is 17-18% of the total population, it is possible to do so today.”
To eradicate poverty within 2022, he stressed on initiating movements, awareness, and pressurising authorities concerned for taking up effective programmes.
He was addressing the launching ceremony of “Manifesto for the Extreme Poor,” a civil society document that demands complete eradication of extreme poverty from Bangladesh by 2022.
The manifesto said: “To eradicate poverty within 2022, it will require lifting up to one million families out of extreme poverty every year from 2016 to 2021.
Addressing the programme, ex-advisor to the caretaker government Dr Hossain Zillur Rahman said Bangladesh has chalked a lot of agenda to eradicate poverty, but reality is, it still remains a problem.
“We need to reenergise our concerns and the manifesto is a way of doing it,” he said.
Pointing towards political will as another matter of achieving poverty alleviation, he said: “Political will is obviously a matter, but poverty agenda and eradication of extreme poverty within a decade is not an impossible dream and to do this, we have to keep our sense of change, liability, and action alive,”
“Bangladesh has taken great strides in development, from microfinance to ORS, from reduction in maternal mortality to improvements in family planning. Now it’s time for Bangladesh to do something extraordinary again. As a symbolic 50th anniversary gift to our nation, let us eradicate extreme poverty from Bangladesh by 2022,” Head of Advocacy, Economic Empowerment of the Poorest, Shazia Omar said.
The manifesto calls for collective action and a three pronged approach to eradicate extreme poverty by 2022 that includes, design and implementation of a national programme of transformative initiatives to enable the six million families to engage with the market, systematically reform public services and social protection transfers to prioritise the needs of the extreme poor; and promote institutional, policy and behavioural changes needed to address the root causes of extreme poverty.
