UN photo
By
Sheuli Akter
In recent years, Bangladesh has been the largest recipient of the World Bank’s interest-free credits.
The latest development is that the Washington-based lender has approved over half a billion U.S. dollars for two projects in the South Asian country to improve health, nutrition, and population services and strengthen the country’s public procurement.
The $515 million Health Sector Support Project will strengthen the country’s health system and improve quality and coverage of essential service delivery, with a focus on Sylhet and Chittagong divisions, where key health indicators are below national average.
It aims to increase the number of mothers receiving quality delivery care in public health facilities to at least 146,000 mothers annually in Sylhet and Chittagong divisions. It will also provide basic immunization to nearly 5 million children.
“The World Bank and the government have been working together for years to improve the health sector and public procurement performance,” said Qimiao Fan, World Bank Country Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal.
“These two projects will help further progress towards better health outcomes and optimal use of public resources through an effective public procurement and monitoring system. This will benefit the entire nation and support Bangladesh’s journey to becoming an upper middle-income country.”
As the country experiences demographic changes, the project will help address emerging health challenges, such as non-communicable diseases. In Sylhet and Chittagong divisions, it will support school-based adolescent health and nutrition services. The project will also help improve financial management and procurement in the sector and develop a robust health information system. It will enable over 7,000 community clinics to provide complete essential data on service delivery, and ensure at least 150 health facilities to each have two accredited midwives on staff.
“Since 1975, the World Bank has been working with Bangladesh to improve health, nutrition and population outcomes, helping reduce maternal mortality by 40 percent as of 2010 and under-5 child mortality by 29 percent as of 2014,” said Patrick Mullen, World Bank Task Team Leader. Further, co-Task Team Leader, Kari Hurt added “The project will support Bangladesh to address emerging health challenges; complete the Millennium Development Goal agenda; and set the foundation to achieve progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.”
The financing will contribute to the government’s $14.7 billion health sector program between 2017 and 2022. It includes a $15 million grant from the Global Financing Facility to improve service delivery for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health and nutrition.
The other financing approved today, the $55 million Digitizing Implementation Monitoring and Public Procurement Project, will help Bangladesh improve public procurement performance, including its capacity to monitor implementation of development projects and programs using digital technology. Bangladesh spends over $7 billion yearly on public procurement, which constitutes about 70 percent of the annual development program.
The World Bank helped Bangladesh roll out electronic procurement (e-GP) in four key public procuring entities in 2011, and establish a high capacity data center in 2016 to accommodate increasing demand for electronic procurement. The new project will expand e-GP to all 1,300 government procuring organizations.
The project will help the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division effectively monitor the execution of annual development programs by establishing a single online platform connecting all public sector organizations. This will capture both financial and physical progress of development work. The project will also engage citizens to monitor quality and progress of development work.
“Since 2002, the World Bank has been supporting Bangladesh to make systemic changes in public procurement to improve the efficiency and transparency of public spending,” said Zafrul Islam, World Bank Task Team Leader.
By institutionalizing electronic procurement and digitizing project implementation monitoring, the project will improve effective utilization of public resources. It will also help enhance accountability of public officials through citizen engagement.
The credits are from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s concessional lending arm. The credits are interest-free and repayable in 38 years, including a 6-year grace period, and carry a service charge of 0.75 percent. The World Bank was among the first development partners to support Bangladesh following its independence. Since then the World Bank has committed over $26 billion grants and interest-free credits to Bangladesh.
Sheuli Akter
Sheuli Akter, from Bangladesh, is a Special Correspondent and Editor of NsNewsWire, (Bangladesh’s First Press Newswire). Previously she had worked for Bangladesh’ top news agency, United News of Bangladesh (UNB) and top newspaper (now defunct) The Bangladesh Observer. She also gained an honourable mention in the first ever World Media Summit WMS Awards for ‘Exemplary News Professionals in Developing Countries’, receiving the award in Beijing in January 2015.
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