Inadequate budget for education is not being helpful
05 January 2023
Though
schools, government as well as the media call the free textbooks
distribution across the country in the beginning of the new academic
year as a 'festival', behind this façade the deplorable fact is
Bangladesh spends less than 2.5 percent of its GDP on education. Here
poor families which are many fail to send their children to school, be
it in urban or rural areas.
The fanfare in the beginning of the year
centering free textbooks fails to hide the truth that families in
Bangladesh bear 71 per cent of total education as has been revealed in a
new UNESCO report produced in association with BRAC and released on
Tuesday in the capital.
There are myriads of complaints against the
education system in Bangladesh such as education's poor quality and poor
budget allocation, corruption, and irregularities. Still, another
worrying fact is that the non-state actors are more involved in every
aspect of the education system in Bangladesh than in any other regions
of the world. This has shot up the cost of education.
Added to this
is the fallout of Covid-19 pandemic for which cost of tuition, private
tuition and stationeries has risen, leading many families to run into
debt for bearing education spending. No, making the teaching profession
attractive cannot be the answer to the problems plaguing education in
Bangladesh as has been pointed out by the education minister who was
present at Tuesday's programme when the UNESCO report was released.
This
kind of amateurish talk will not help the country's education when the
real problems lie in poor planning, substandard syllabus making,
inadequate budget allocation, corruption, mismanagement and
irregularities. Bangladesh has an education policy framed in 2010 which
remains fine on paper but not in reality.
But the government must
increase fund allocation for education and gradually move to eliminate
the monthly pay order system which is not equity focused and failing to
promote quality. Nationalisation of MPO educational institutions will
certainly create a positive impact on enhancing the quality of
education. Moreover, the government needs to set quality standards that
apply to all institutions and improve state capacity.
