Bangladesh is among only three countries beside India and Cambodia tasting the fastest rate of reduction in poverty indicators.
The revelation has been made by a UN body noting that the South Asian country got about 19.3 million people out of poverty between 2004 and 2014, which is the the fastest reduction in poverty index during the time on record.
UNDP released the 2019 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) on July 11.
One of the findings in the report noted that population in multidimensional poverty in Bangladesh had dropped to 74.4 million in 2014 from 93.7 million in 2004.
The UNDP index this year covered 101 countries – 31 low income, 68 middle income, and 2 high income – covering 5.2 billion out of 5.7 billion people in those countries.
It used 10 indicators — nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, and assets — to determine different dimensions of poverty.
The report said a whopping total of 1.3 billion people or 23.1 percent across the studied countries are multidimensional poor with two-thirds of them living in the middle-income countries (MICs).
It analysed 10 countries with a combined population of about 2 billion to illustrate different patterns of reduction in MPI values.
The index covered every developing region and spanned three income categories: upper middle (Peru), lower middle (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam), and low (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Haiti).
These 10 countries made overall progress towards Sustainable Development Goal-1: No Poverty.
“The fastest absolute reductions in MPI value were in Bangladesh, India, and Cambodia, followed by Ethiopia and Haiti,” the report said.
Ethiopia, India, and Peru significantly reduced deprivations in all 10 indicators, each in different ways, while Bangladesh and Cambodia reduced deprivations in nine indicators.
According to the index, rural areas in all 10 countries are poorer than urban areas. But in Bangladesh and Democratic Republic of the Congo poverty fell at the same speed in rural and urban areas.
In Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, India and Peru, child poverty fell notably faster than adult poverty.
