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A startling 121-million people in Bangladesh cannot afford a healthy diet, according to a World Bank (WB) report.
Some 3.1-billion people globally, including Bangladesh’s 121 million, are unable to afford a healthy diet, a challenge made worse by global crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it said.
In 2021, nearly 828-million people were undernourished, close to one in every 10 people in the world, the Washington-based lender said at its ‘Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2023’.
The WB report was published based on SDG progress worldwide from its Washington headquarters on Thursday.
The global lender also said some 12-million people in Bangladesh were under the extreme poverty line in 2019.
According to the report, Bangladesh saw 235 events of political violence (battle, explosions/remote violence and violence against civilian events) occurred in 2022.
“Today, almost a billion people live in fragile and conflict-affected situations. In 2022, civilians across the world faced more than 116,000 violent events, a third of them in Ukraine.”
According to the WB, 88-per cent people in Bangladesh have received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, although the global average is 70 per cent.
During the Covid-19 period, schools across the country were closed for 376 days fully or partially between March 2020 and September 2021, it cited.
“Globally, 1.6-billion children were affected by school closures during Covid. …Schools were fully or partially closed for 199 days between March 2020 and September 2021,” reads the report.
“As a result, the average student globally is roughly 1.0 year behind their expected learning levels, with larger losses in the poorest countries.”
Under the SDG-05 (gender equality), women in Bangladesh spent more time on unpaid care work than men.
Bangladesh’s water stress level was 6.0 per cent as its access to clean water has increased in recent decades, disclosed the report.
“Although access to clean water has increased in recent decades, population growth and climate change threaten to aggravate water scarcity in many countries. Since the 1960s, about two-thirds of countries have seen an increase in their level of water stress.”
According to the WB, some 47 kilogram of CO? per capita is emitted from road transport per year in Bangladesh, which is still below the world average.
Road transport accounted for 706 kg of CO? emissions per person on average in 2020, it reported.
Although global inequality declined for decades before the arrival of Covid-19 as the Gini index dropped from about 70 in 1990 to 62 in 2019, the WB SDG Atlas showed, the pandemic resulted in the largest increase in global inequality in three decades.
Bangladesh’s Gini index is 32.
The country’s per-capita CO? emission was 1.3 tonnes in 2019, which was below the world average of 6.2 tonnes, reads the report.
According to the SDG Atlas 2023, Bangladesh’s forest area is 15 per cent as a proportion of the total land area in 2020.
The WB’s Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2023 presents interactive storytelling and data visualisations about 17 SDGs.
It highlights trends for selected targets within each goal and introduces concepts about how some SDGs are measured.
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