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Take up productive social safety net schemes: BIDS

Star Business Report
The Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) suggests taking up productive social safety net programmes, incorporating higher amounts for individuals, so that there can be saving and investments towards poverty alleviation.
"Rather than spoon-feeding over a longer period it is better to support a mini-big push over a shorter period to have a large effect on poverty reduction," said Binayak Sen, research director of the BIDS.
According to the Household Income & Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2016 data, 12.9 percent of Bangladesh's population lies in extreme poverty while 24.3 percent in moderate poverty.
Sen said social safety net at present was just a token transfer but people needed more funds to overcome the poverty trap, which arises when financially insolvent people spend money for consumption and do not save.
To bring economic and behavioural changes, meaning bringing about a tendency to save and invest, they need a higher amount of money, he said yesterday while presenting a research paper on poverty.
Presented at the second session of BIDS Research Almanac 2019 in the Lakeshore hotel, the paper had Mohammad Riaz Uddin, research associate of the BIDS, as the co-author.
The suggestions were based on an analysis of a government programme titled "Strengthening Women's Ability for Productive New Opportunities" (SWAPNO) being run in association with United Nations Development Programme.
The programme offers a strategy coupling social protection with
strengthened governance.
The target group gets training on a livelihood alongside money to not only meet living expenses but also to save some for investing in the livelihood and farms, said Riaz Uddin.
It is designed to be a training on savings and delivery of higher amounts of money within a short time, he said, adding that the project has an around 85 percent success rate in lifting people out of poverty.
Such programmes will raise the government's costs a bit but have a big impact on poverty alleviation, he added.
Imran Matin, executive director of the Brae Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), said social safety net programmes were a short-term idea which should get the concept of productive safety net incorporated.
Because unproductive safety net programmes are difficult to run for long period, he said, clarifying that they were not suggesting bringing an end to social safety net programmes.
The event saw the presentation of three more research papers.
Take up productive social safety net schemes
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Khan Ahmed Sayeed Murshid, director general of the BIDS, said there has been a recent outcry that many educated people were not getting jobs.
The BIDS research on employment among educated people shows overall unemployment to be the lowest among those having passed SSC and HSC exams (27-28 percent) and the highest for those attaining Bachelor of Arts degrees (36.6 percent). Meanwhile, some 34.3 percent of those holding Master of Arts degrees are unemployed.
A stark difference remains with salaries being shaped by education levels so people still want to attain postgraduate degrees, he said while presenting a paper on employment and unemployment amongst educated youth. "So, education still matters."
He found the performance of arts graduates to be poor, those with vocational training well, science students not particularly well and O-level students very well.
SM Zulfiqar Ali, senior research fellow of the BIDS, said Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty over the past decades but there were some pockets where poverty was really high and "probably" increasing as well. The HIES 2016 data says 70.8 percent people of Kurigram are still poor whereas Ali’s research puts it at 77.3 percent. He ran the research in four districts where his figures were higher than those of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
Over the past decade, income in Kurigram and Dinajpur has remained the same, he said while presenting a paper on finding the reasons of increasing poverty in some districts.
He cited some reasons for persistent poverty like poor asset and human capital bases, high dependence on day labour, high dependency ratio, poor access to infrastructure and credit, high exposure to various shocks and high incidents of natural hazards.