Post pandemic attainment of SDGs in Bangladesh

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 multifaceted goals set by United Nations in the year 2015 that covers a wide array of objectives to be achieved by the years 2030 in order to ensure that economic development takes into consideration the aspects of social and environmental impact of said economic development.

The world has seen a rapid change in our ways of lives since early 2020 resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. This has altered plans, developments around the planet and have had tremendous impact on the economic growth as well as the progress of sustainable development.

The Sustainable Development Report (formerly the SDG Index & Dashboards) is a global assessment of countries' progress towards achieving the SDGs and the report shows setback in 2019 onwards on a global scale resulting from the pandemic. While the world has seen many crises in this century, nothing has affected health, education, and income as did Covid-19 in the last two years. Several of the objectives of the SDGs were hit hard by the prevailing pandemic.

In terms of healthcare, the world saw a major setback and lost countless lives regardless of the size of their economy. SDG 3 Good health and wellbeing is one of the most affected goals resulting from the pandemic.

Another direct affects of Covid-19 after healthcare has been the impact on people's income. The resulting lockdown to ensure social distancing and address the infection fears has resulted into blanket lockdown of nations. People lost their jobs, their living, businesses not being able to pay wages and salaries became a norm in 2020. This negatively affected SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 1: No Poverty and, SDG 2: Zero Hunger.

Globally, the next most affected sector has been the education sector. To control infection and to impose limited social interaction, nations chose to keep their economy running and made the ultimate sacrifice to not send their children to schools, colleges and universities. The world shifted to online education but this has not been as practical for the developing nations as it has been for the developed ones.   

Although, it must be pointed out that while the world struggled with Covid-19 and resulting economic crisis, Bangladeshi economy and development faced the challenges comparatively well and the economy has proven to be one of the most resilient one to do so during the pandemic with a 7 percent GDP growth in FY 2021 and a projected 7.5 percent growth for FY 2022.

Finally, after more than 2 years the world has seen some form of developments in terms of normalizing the way of life all across the planet. Partially owing to the widespread implementation of the vaccination programs, we are hoping to finally say goodbye to Covid 19 and enter the endemic phase of the Covid-19. For Bangladesh another major issue in the post pandemic day will be to shift policy related focus on issues such as SDG 12: Responsible consumption, SDG 16: Peace and Justice Strong Institutions.

As an economy grows a major challenge is to address the increasing consumption and the toll it takes on environment, Bangladesh has yet to come up with contemporary policies and their implementation to address the environmental cost of economic development. Alongside, our governance mechanism also need to address justice for everyone and increased accountability of the government to ensure the growth is fairly distributed for everyone in the society.

Social inequality is on the rise during the pandemic, a 2021 International Monetary Fund report cited an extreme rise in the number of ultra-rich and extreme poor. The two most affected SDG region in terms of rising social inequality has been healthcare and education. The digital inequality in these sectors has been significant during the past 2 years.

Primary and higher education has suffered a severe damage as most students from rural and economically disadvantaged areas could not avail digital devices and thus could not access online education. Most public universities suffered the brunt of pandemic and lockdown as students could not afford devices and access to internet.

Healthcare sector also suffered irreparable damage because of this digital divide, initially a major challenge for Bangladesh has been to provide access to vaccination to everyone. However, resulting from poor digital literacy and lack of access to digital devices and the internet majority of the people failed to register for vaccines of their own.

However, with our government adopting innovative mechanism such as walk in vaccination program and vaccine portfolio diversification addressed the divide well. As per current estimates, Bangladesh currently has 77 percent vaccination rate which is slightly higher than the Asia and Europe average of 75 and 68 percent respectively. The amount is comparable to that of the United Kingdom at 78 percent vaccination and a considerable achievement for an emerging economy as hours.

Another major challenge for the post pandemic Bangladesh to attain the healthcare SDG is going to be to address the challenges caused by non-communicable diseases. Non-communicable diseases such as Kidney, Liver or Heart related illnesses have received less attention during the pandemic as the priority and resources were shifted to lowering infection rate, thus these should be on national healthcare priority in the post pandemic world.

As the very essence of Sustainable Development Goals are to leave no one behind, our government need to adapt our post pandemic goals and plans to execute the implementation of previously planned programs that ensure a smooth 2030 attainment of SDGs.
Dr Gour Gobinda Goswami, Professor, Department of Economics, North
South University, and Director of
Student Affairs, NSU.
Quazi Tafsirul Islam, Lecturer of Strategy & Human Resources, North South University; Faculty Advisor, NSU
Human Resources Club.