HELTH SECTOR OF BANGLADESH

Bangladesh is one of the developing countries of the world with a growing yet small sized economy. Resource constraint has become a major impediment towards achieving our development goals in health sector among others as well. Raising the level of nutrition and improving public health is a constitutional responsibility of the state. Health sector thus remains one of the leading sectors receiving development expenditures each year in Bangladesh. Successive governments of Bangladesh have also prioritized health agenda in the election campaigns and manifesto. Despite drawbacks over the years Bangladesh has made land marking achievements in some areas of health that has been acclaimed by world community.

In 2010, the UN recognized the country for its exemplary progress towards Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 4 in child mortality and for being on-track to achieve the maternal mortality reduction goals of MDG 5. More recently, Bangladesh was praised as an example of “good health at low cost”. 31% population of Bangladesh lives below the poverty line that indicates the high dependency of a large number of people in an overwhelmingly 150 millions nation of government. But unlike many countries, still the size of government budget is smaller in comparison with the demand. Volume of public expenditure in comparison with other countries is fairy low.

However, 15% allocation of budget for health sector is apparently a far away point down on the line in future budgets of Bangladesh as there are many other sectors competing for higher budgetary allocation.