Bangladesh has been experiencing a rapid growth in terms of urban zones as well as urban population. Urban population in Bangladesh has grown at an annual average rate of nearly six percent since independence, at a time when national population growth was about 2.2%. However, the growth of the urban population is lopsided across different divisional cities and more than 60% of Bangladesh’s urban population is concentrated mainly in four metropolitan cities- Dhaka, Chittagong, Khulna, and Rajshahi. The UN estimation shows that more than half of the population of this country will be living across the cities by 2030. Nonetheless, the urbanization in Bangladesh has remained unplanned and most of the urban slums and low-income settlements are confronted with major problems of poverty and lack of basic services.
Families and households migrate to cities for different reasons of which economic pull factors like livelihood opportunities and envirmental push factors like natural calamities are very common. A major portion of people who migrate to cities after losing their ancestral land due to river erosion, poverty, and other reasons take shelter in the densely populated slums. At present, about 2.23 million people live in slums across the country (BBS, 2015) while this figure was 1.39 million in 1999. Like other developing countries, slums in Bangladesh are not equipped with basic facilities such as proper housing, safe drinking water, sanitation, and healthcare. The limited access to the basic services is often associated with the political environment as the locally influential people control the supply of electricity and water to informal settlements like slums. Moreover, enrolment of the slum children in schools and completion of education by children in slums are lower. Urban poor, especially women and children, suffer from malnutrition and proper access to healthcare.
The requirement of the support from the government for the poor urban communities is noticeable from the fact that a lot of the households in the urban slums experience poverty and remain vulnerable to shocks that can threaten their well-being. Till date, the national social protection system has been aligned mainly to the needs of the rural poor rather than that of the urban poor. It is only in the recent decade, the 7th Five-Year Plan and particularly the NSSS aims to address the issue of urban poverty through various initiatives. Though recent formulation of NSSS in 2015 by the Government anticipated expanding the coverage of social protection programmes for the urban poor communities, little has changed.
Despite the extra-ordinary achievements in terms of the income growth, human development and vulnerability reduction, poverty, especially in urban areas, has remained a major challenge for Bangladesh. Urban poverty, with its distinct features and about 19% of urban people living below the upper poverty line, remains an active threat for the overall human development of the country. Because of its specialized nature, poverty reduction strategies and programmes require to address the issues of urban poverty from different perspectives. With the growing number of the urban population, the existing policies and programmes targeted to bring down the number of urban poor have been proved to be ineffective. Hence, formulation and implementation of effective policies and programmes are prerequisites to fight the challenges that urban poverty pose.
Unplanned city growth, illegal encroachments on public land, poor urban governance, and, lack of policy attention to the needs of the informal sector are some of the key factors exacerbating the problems of urban poverty in Bangladesh. Like the secondary literature, questionnaire survey conducted under this study reveal several forms of vulnerabilities that urban poor are facing. Higher prevalence of informal employment, lower level of literacy among the household heads, lack of training opportunities, lack of access to formal financial system, and lack of proper knowledge about the social protection system are some of the key findings from the survey. Moreover, the study also reflects the lack of access to land, housing, safe drinking water, sanitation, and utility connections by the urban poor.
As suggested by the primary and secondary data, urban poor are subject to various forms of deprivations and vulnerabilities. All the legal, institutional, economic, and political structures pose different types of challenges for the urban poor living in slums and low-income settlements. Lack of legal status in the slums restrict the ability of urban poor in accessing housing facilities as well as utility connections, registering for NID cards, and in accessing the Social Protection Programmes (SPPs). The lack of land tenure also creates the dependency structure of urban poor on the locally influential people to survive in the slums. All the systematic and unsystematic process of exclusions affect the welfare of the urban poor and restricts their ability to get included in the existing social protection system. Urban poverty, being distinct from rural poverty in many ways, thus require customized social protection programmes contextualized with the local needs. Experience of designing and implementing social protection programmes for urban areas varies among countries, mostly in the developing world. Reviewing several well-acclaimed SPPs from few countries, several key lessons can be utilized in the context of Bangladesh.
