Reports on hunger and food insecurity are unnerving. The 2025 state of food security and nutrition in the world (SOFI) report finds that 673 million people constituting 8.3 per cent of the global population faced acute hunger in 2024. The SOFI is an annual publication by five important United Natio
During last Ramadan, standing beside UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in a refugee camp, Professor Muhammad Yunus expressed his hope that the Rohingya community would be able to offer their next Eid prayers in their homeland of Arakan. His words kindled a fragile expectation among a persecuted
Digital financial transactions have increased by leaps and bounds over the past decade in Bangladesh, primarily driven by the impressive growth in the number of Mobile Financial Service (MFS) users. Estimates suggest that there are now more than 90 million active MFS users in the country, collectiv
As delegates began to gather in Belém, deep in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, for the COP30 climate summit, reports published in the Global Carbon Budget landed like a thunderclap-reminding the world that rhetoric has far outpaced action. The report, released last week, warns that global
Bangladesh, one of the world's most climate-exposed nations, has recently got a sobering reminder how vulnerable its own governance systems remains in the face of an unfolding planetary emergency. The latest findings of the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) reveal that more than half of t
The Transparency International, Bangladesh (TIB) in early March this year, revealed that private buses and minibuses pay over Tk10.59 billion annually as extortion money to political affiliates, the police, the Bangladesh Road Transport Association (BRTA), city corporations and municipal officials
For more than a decade, the global community has been working towards the goal of doubling the share of global exports from the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to two per cent by 2020, up from one per cent a decade ago. There has been the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs') c
Bangladesh stands among the world's most climate-vulnerable nations, not only in statistical rankings but in the lived experience of millions. The country has entered an era in which the scale and frequency of natural disasters can no longer be predicted within familiar seasonal or geographical pat
Bangladesh's graduation from its least developed country (LDC) status to a developing nation has become highly contentious. While the interim government is in favour of maintaining the timeline for the graduation scheduled for November, 2026, the private sector opposes such a move arguing that the
That ground water table is falling dangerously low is a major worry for the country. This has been going on over the last few decades and experts have been repeatedly sounding alarms. Over-extraction to meet the growing need of an increasing population is the obvious reason. Some of the extracted w
Now that the dust has begun to settle after Zohran Mamdani's decisive victory in the New York mayoral election, the question that looms large is whether he can deliver on his ambitious promises as a self-declared democratic socialist. His victory, though confined to one of the world's most diverse
The global trading system is undergoing a profound transformation. What was once a relatively predictable, rules-based order -- governed by multilateral disciplines and anchored in the assumption of gradual liberalisation -- has given way to a far more volatile, transactional reality. Tariffs, once
Already ranked ninth globally for climate disaster risk, according to the World Risk Index 2023, Bangladesh, so far, seems to have resigned itself to its fate. Worse, it has been doing everything to make matters worse often in the name of development work. So, one is not surprised when, according a
