WHO Bangladesh Country Cooperation Strategy: 2020–2024

Overview

In the recent decades Bangladesh has made remarkable socioeconomic progress, including poverty reduction, improvement in women’s education, increasing life expectancy and improvement in population health status and indicators such as reduction in under-five mortality rate (for which Bangladesh has achieved the MDG 4 target).

Notable progress has also been made on other key health indicators such as reducing maternal, infant and child deaths and malnutrition, increasing immunization coverage, eliminating infectious diseases such as polio and reducing the incidence of malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhoeal diseases.

But despite such substantial progress, the country now faces new and emerging new challenges such as the rising burden of noncommunicable diseases, increased risks associated with disasters, environmental threats and health emergencies during disease outbreaks including the COVID-19 pandemic that is a serious public health threat to Bangladesh. To establish a resilience system for future potential pandemics, the national capacity for emergency preparedness and early response to health emergencies needs to be bolstered considerably.

Some of the challenges faced by the health systems remain critical, such as high out-of-pocket payments by households, inequitable access to health services between the rich and the poor, lack of quality of care, shortage of skilled service providers, and widespread increase in unregulated informal providers. All of this has slowed down the progress towards achieving universal health coverage (UHC).

To address the newer challenges as well as sustain the achievements, the Government of Bangladesh has developed the Health Population Nutrition Sector Programme (HPNSP) 2017–2022 to realize the global health targets envisaged by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. The HPNSP has articulated a set of objectives, strategies and activities to advance the country towards achieving UHC. The government has accorded firm priority to people-centred accessible health systems focusing on three key areas: i) governance and stewardship; ii) strengthening health systems, and iii) quality of health services.

This new Country Cooperation Strategy (CCS) for 2020–2024 of the WHO Country Office for Bangladesh has been developed based on partnership experiences with the stakeholders that include the government. An interactive process has been followed with in-depth interviews, group discussions and a series of consultative meetings with the government (the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare), development partners, academic institutions, professional bodies, civil society organizations and nongovernmental organizations being a part.

The strategic agendas of the new CCS are aligned with the HPNSP 2017–2022, the Government’s 7th Five Year Plan (2016–2020), WHO’s priorities and new roles as outlined in the Thirteenth General Programme of Work (GPW13) 2019–2023, the global and regional priorities of WHO including the Regional Director’s Flagship Priority Programmes, and overall the SDGs. This CCS complements the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF: 2017– 2020) for Bangladesh.