ZCZC
BSS-27
WEBINAR-SOCIOECONOMIC-SERVICES
Socioeconomic services crucial to sustain development impact: speakers
DHAKA, June 12, 2020 (BSS) – Speakers at a webinar have called for
ensuring socioeconomic services to sustain development impacts and
reduce poverty in the country.
The webinar was organised yesterday by CARE Bangladesh in
association with Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), a
CARE press release said today.
A study commissioned by CARE Bangladesh on social and economic
integration in market systems was presented at the online discussion.
While commenting on the study outcome, Rubaiyath Sarwar, the lead
researcher of the study, said the poor and the disadvantaged face two
types of systemic challenges- on one side, the dysfunctional economic
systems mean that they have income poverty; and on the other side, the
governance challenges in the local community and the local governance
systems mean that they are deprived of social services that they are
entitled to.
“Market systems work has huge potential to help address poverty at
a scale. Among others, understanding and addressing challenges around
contextual systemic constraint on market system is critical,” said
Prabodh Devkota, Deputy Country Director- Programme of Care
Bangladesh.
Fouzia Nasreen, Senior Technical Adviser, Swiss Foundation for
Technical Cooperation, said: “We cannot solve all socioeconomic
problems by adopting a single approach. We need to focus on the
incremental changes at the life and livelihood of the poor and the
disadvantaged. A gender transformative outlook is also required to
shift the power imbalance in the society.”
Shakeb Nabi, Country Director, ICCO Bangladesh, said: “The discourse
around resilience got new connotation in Bangladesh; it encompasses
natural disaster, poverty and COVID. Due to COVID-19 pandemic, about
30 percent people are at risk of falling back to the poverty line. We
need to check how far existing models of market development could able
to safeguard smallholder producers from this kind of emerging crisis
irrespective of social and economic.”
Anowarul Haq, Social Development Adviser of DFID, said: “Approaches
and interventions to eradicate poverty is not linear, we need to
understand the root causes of poverty from the perspective of people
living in poverty and the stakeholders associated with them including
NGOs and local market actors.”
BSS/PR/MRI/MRU/1955hrs