Towards living in an anti poverty world, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had been established in the year of 2000; and by 2015, a massive progress has come across the MDGs that include mainly eradication of global poverty, enforcing child education, reducing child death, access to pure drinking water and successful controlling of some diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The achievements in these areas are really making a difference in our lives and the progress ultimately leads us to get a status of a lower-middle income country (LMIC), declared by the World Bank. Perhaps, we will also be able to get up-gradation of our present status – middle income country by 2021. However, it is understandable to all of us that our NGOs have a great contributions to overcome our poverty situation since 1971, even our NGO activities in many areas are not always appreciated by the country’s citizens. But, in spite of such few claims, NGOs have a great contribution in increasing our employment opportunities along with its own mechanism to reduce the global poverty. Survival of NGOs in context of middle income country
Although Bangladesh has achieved a lot in terms of social development; sustainable development
challenges have not been addressed adequately. The numbers of sustainability indicators are not enough
Polin Kumar Saha
Towards living in an anti poverty world, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had been established in the year of 2000; and by 2015, a massive progress has come across the MDGs that include mainly eradication of global poverty, enforcing child education, reducing child death, access to pure drinking water and successful controlling of some diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The achievements in these areas are really making a difference in our lives and the progress ultimately leads us to get a status of a lower-middle income country (LMIC), declared by the World Bank. Perhaps, we will also be able to get up-gradation of our present status middle income country by 2021. However, it is understandable to all of us that our NGOs have a great contributions to overcome our poverty situation since 1971, even our NGO activities in many areas are not always appreciated by the countrys citizens. But, in spite of such few claims, NGOs have a great contribution in increasing our employment opportunities along with its own mechanism to reduce the global poverty.
With promising imperatives of globalization, the world has changed a pattern of global development paths in the post MDGs era which indicates the SDGs (sustainable Development Goals) vision 2030. That means, the development needs a further development in an advanced way where we need to reshape our existing development goals to reach the vision 2030. After getting the status of LMIC recently, an important voice has been raised from many NGO professionals that the donor funded projects are going to fall soon in Bangladesh, so that a great portion of NGO-based livelihoods might be affected due to our shifting from lower income country to lower middle income country. However, in respect to our present development status, our government seems to be very happy since it is a political agenda as they can expose themselves to achieve their political interest through announcing the poverty status. On the other hand, we the common people (especially for NGO professionals) are worried because of getting the status in possible decreasing of the foreign aid in our development projects. Its also true that the foreign funding of our many development projects has already been planned for not to further extension, or the continuation of the projects will be just finishing on the basis of an existing agreement. Therefore, in these perspectives, what strategic directions NGOs should comply with now? In what ways NGOs could sustain in the post MDGs and towards vision 2030?
At the moment of forwarding with SDGs, I understand the upcoming foreign aids certainly seek for the new intervention in achieving the UN 17 goals of sustainable development, which through we have not still planned; or, especially for some goals of SDGs framework that are yet to be initiated by the NGOs in Bangladesh. Presently, our country needs to act promptly to take over the opportunities emerged from the rising economic scenario, so that our existence with the running projects could be in a new dimension to rearrange the NGOs upcoming projects for a sustainable future. It is our evidence based understanding that the achievement of middle income country status is just a matter of a few years ahead; and after getting another status by 2021, we could have a crucial demand for undertaking the design of new projects in relation to the SDG goals. Compared to the past MDGs, we have to think about which goals of SDGs would be much more innovative, vital and immediately needed for the country in the context of existing developmental dimension. For example, we are overwhelmed with our children getting facility for attending primary school, which was one of the goals of MDG; but, now it could be a better direction if we work in ensuring the quality of education within an international standard, that will ultimately lead to an opportunity in working for one of SDGs. Therefore, all our existing education projects could get a reshape for their further extension of implementation for achieving SDGs. Similarly, since we have achieved enormous success in access to water and safe drinking water, we could extend this kind of projects with a new shape for working on reducing the scarcity of safe drinking water, leading to another goal of SDG. However, the handling of projects by the NGOs have to go down due to improvement of the countrys poverty status; that is true in a sense, but it is also true in terms of transferring to the SDGs. We could create huge opportunities to work with lots of development issues depending on sustainable innovation of the existing projects.
The present state of Bangladeshs development has been in a good progress in major social and economic indicators despite the challenges from various domestic and external factors, including political instability, global recession, or adaptation to the impacts of climate change. Although Bangladesh achieved a long way in terms of social development, sustainable development challenges are still unaddressed up to the mark in our projects. The number of sustainability indicators are not strong enough and, even not established yet, especially for reaching the goals of SDGs. In line with the SDGs, the mentionable several development sectors in Bangladesh should consider the development projects, especially consisting of ensuring fundamental needs of human being, modern energy services, decent working environment, fostering innovation, inequality of income, sustainable cities, resource consumption pattern, conserving marine resources and partnership networking. Persistent and context based sustainability indicators have not suggested yet in these areas. Time has come to consider our development paths with respect to the above issues and it should be our faster initiative in these areas; otherwise we will push into backward at the time of our journey towards middle income status leading to the vision 2030. As the citizens of Bangladesh, the urgency is to tap the high quality and potentiality in all the existing development sectors that lie in continuous demonstration of our strengths and building the survival platform to move forward with minimising our weaknesses.
Finally, we could have a quotation survival of the fittest. Therefore, in achieving our continual success, we have to correspond with our present sustainability challenges addressing with an innovation process in the upcoming projects. Our better economic condition could develop the envisioned policy and sustainable infrastructure of any institutions rather than the decreased trend of foreign funding for our projects. I would say the countrys increased money flow makes us happy in creating a new direction of initiating new projects in line with the SDGs by 2030.
The writer is a researcher on sustainability [email protected]; [email protected]
