[ALOCHONA] US poverty fund eludes Dhaka again

US poverty fund eludes Dhaka again
Shakhawat Hossain

Courtesy New Age 27/8/09

 

Dhaka has once again missed out on the Washington-sponsored Millennium Challenge Account as it failed to fulfill the criteria for the aid package designed to help low-income countries reduce poverty.
   The Economic Relations Division has been conveyed the message recently by the US authority that Bangladesh did not qualify for the American aid programme for 2009, ministry officials said.
   ERD additional secretary Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan told New Age that they were surprised by the message.
   He observed that Dhaka should have been favoured as an MCA recipient as reports from agencies like UNESCO, WHO, World Bank and IMF reflected Bangladesh’s improvements in many areas which are closely linked to the criteria set for the US programme.
   He said the ministry was yet to examine the reasons for the country’s being dropped out.
   Finance minister AMA Muhith had expressed optimism about getting MCA fund after a meeting with some US officials at his secretariat office in January. ‘As we are effectively addressing the problems of corruption and malgovernance, we can get fund from the MCA,’ said Muhith.
   This is for the fifth straight occasion that the US aid package eludes Bangladesh since its inception in 2004.
   Dhaka has long been trying to qualify for the fund mainly to repair the image after Transparency International’s perception index portrayed Bangladesh as the world’s most corrupt nation for four years in a row since 2001.
   Poor performance indicators in the areas of corruption and governance held back Bangladesh’s prospects for the MCA in the past.
   Sources in the ERD said incomplete data on progress made in primary education and fiscal transparency could be the potential reasons for this year’s failure to meet the criteria set by Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent body administering the MCA.
   They said the USAID in Dhaka had wanted the ERD to send updates on fiscal policy and primary education so that it could ask the MCC to review the Dhaka plea.
   The ERD has already asked the ministries and departments concerned to send the updates on the issues by Thursday.
   The US government has so far approved nearly $3 billion in assistance through the MCA for 25 countries including Jordan, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Armenia, Bolivia and Honduras.

 

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