Investing in Early Years: How can Bangladesh realize the full potential of its social protection system?

Investing in in early childhood development is one of the most critical investments a country can make to break the cycle of poverty. The early years are known as a window of opportunity for human growth and development and sets the stage for lifelong human capital formation. Ensuring adequate nutrition and cognitive development during children's early years can maximize a child's intelligence, health, learning, and productivity, as well as emotional and social wellbeing. Despite Bangladesh's success in improving development outcomes and reducing child mortality, health and learning outcomes for children remain a challenge. Bangladesh accounts for four percent of stunted children globally which has a major impact on learning outcomes. Poorer households bear a disproportionate share of the burden of stunting and have limited access to early childhood development interventions, perpetuating the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Social protection programs can help in channeling critical investments for young children in poor and vulnerable households. The National Social Security Strategy lays out a vision for a comprehensive child benefit program to support improved infant and maternal wellbeing. While there are a number of government programs which focus on the nutrition and cognitive wellbeing of children, there is further scope to improve the planning, design and delivery of these programs.

What are the challenges?

In Bangladesh, child-focused programs account for only about two percent of the total social protection budget in 2020-2021. Appropriate resource allocation in line with national priorities is critical to realize returns from investing in early childhood development. While the Maternity Allowance Program for the Poor (MAPP) focuses on poor women in rural areas and Allowances for Urban Lactating Mothers (AULM) focuses on working women in urban areas and both programs have increased three-fold between 2016-2020 but resource allocation still falls far below what is required to take programs to full scale.

Ensuring the right people are benefited, and benefit levels are adequate, also is key to the investment of these programs. A recent World Bank review on the Efficiency of Social Protection Expenditure on Early Years suggests that about 50 percent of eligible households in rural areas and over 60 percent in urban areas are left out of coverage. As a result, many children living in poor and vulnerable households are missing out on interventions that could shape a better future for them. Although the current monthly benefits (BDT 800) provided by the maternal and child allowances are higher than many other social protection programs, these are still quite low to have any significant impact. For instance, the Public Expenditure Review finds that transfers under the largest seven social protection programs are on average equal to only about three percent of total income of a poor or extremely poor person. Any shock or inflation and increase in food prices can further reduce the real value of these benefits.

Finally, the method of payment is a critical part in the overall delivery system. For cash transfers, the government-to-person (G2P) payments platform has been able to minimize transfer processing time, but there remains scope to strengthen payment provider services and build awareness for beneficiaries.

Pathway to Early Childhood Investment

Several approaches can be taken for effectively improving and maximizing the impact of early years' programs:

• For planning, increase allocation for early years programs, in line with the number of young children living in poor households, regional dimensions, and vulnerability context. The 8th Five Year Plan rightly proposes to increase allocation up to 0.3 percent of GDP.
• For design, ensure full coverage of the poorest by early years' programs, through improved eligibility criteria and identification processes. The National Household Database (NHD) can be used for identification processes.
• For program definition, revisit the amounts transferred to ensure they can have a meaningful impact on poverty. Using insights from behavioral science to enrich interventions with accompanying measures can help promote the adoption of good practice around care, nutrition, and stimulation.
• For delivery, strengthen coordination between relevant ministries so that an integrated package of services can be provided to households. There needs to be greater capacity at the local level to deliver services/counseling. This could be done through partnership arrangements with ministries as well as NGOs.

By addressing some of these core issues in its social protection programs targeted for early years, Bangladesh can continue to make further gains in human capital and help to bring more children from poor and vulnerable families to realize their full potential. To learn more, read the policy note "Efficiency of Planning, Programming, and Delivery of Social Protection Programs in Early Years."