Population and MDGs in Bangladesh: Achievement and Challenges

Bangladesh has been approaching to reach the targets for Millennium Development Goals by 2015, in particular, the indicators under education and health related goals. The indicators relating to family planning and fertility show on track in the recent past. The adolescent fertility rate has been reduced significantly, which leads annual population growth down to 1.3 percent with TFR 2.3. It is expected that the country will incessantly continue to improve the status of social indicators including population dynamics and health conditions, which will create congenial environment to meet the MDG targets.

Although the country will achieve the goals as a whole but the challenges hindered at the sub-national level where some pockets are there, in particular the riverine southern and northern areas, with low family planning use, high fertility, high MMR. It needs to pay attention in order to transmit the benefit of millennium goals uniformly in the country such as reduction of child mortality, reduction of adolescent fertility, maternal mortality etc. . Embedding holistic and compatible action plans in the population and health areas in the concerned regions would foster accelerated social development that might be narrowed down the regional disparities in reaching the sub-national level MDG targets to be achieved by 2015.