Introduction

Bangladesh is one of the major developing countries in the Global South. In recent years, the country has played an important role in the changing pattern of regional peace, development and politics. The country has shown demonstrable progress based on different development indicators, such as reducing extreme poverty rates and hunger, ensuring universal primary education and decreasing the gender gap in education and the workforce.

Major development challenges, however, continue to affect the country's growth and development performance. Despite being culturally and racially homogenous in comparison to most of its neighbouring countries, a large portion of Bangladesh's population is still deprived of development efforts initiated by the government, non-governmental organisations and international agencies. In response to this issue, the government of Bangladesh and its agencies were actively involved from the beginning in framing, planning and implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the United Nations agencies in the local context.

The deadline for achieving the MDGs was 2015, and many countries and regions, including Bangladesh, fell short. What are the factors or crises that played a detrimental role in preventing MDG progress? In Bangladesh, the contributing factors were likely to have been its large poverty-stricken population, climate change, different types of natural disasters, confrontation politics, a negative financial and institutional capacity, heavy dependence on foreign aid, greater urban centralisation, weak civil society and global issues such as oil and food price increases. Economic recession in the west also had a tremendous impact on Bangladesh's chances of achieving the MDGs.

The findings of this chapter aim to contribute to public policy discourse on why not only Bangladesh, but also other countries with similar socio-economic and cultural contexts, did not achieve the MDG targets by the given deadline. Thus far, the development discourse has been muted on the importance of considering uncertainty factors that were likely to have jeopardised the pace of MDG progress. This chapter therefore provides a critical perspective on a country-specific development challenges and helps to refine our development thoughts and strategies for the future through the consideration of all possible challenges and uncertainties.

Background

For more than a decade, the MDGs were the major framework for international aid, cooperation and development initiatives at the local, national and international level.