Final Strategic Reform Chapter

Bangladesh’s social protection system has undergone important transformation since the adoption of the National Social Security Strategy (NSSS) in 2015. The NSSS introduced a lifecycle approach to social protection and sought to move the country away from a fragmented set of safety net programs towards a more coherent system organised around poverty, vulnerability and risks across the life course. As the implementation period of the first NSSS comes to a close in June 2026, Bangladesh now has an important opportunity to draw lessons from the past decade and develop a second-generation strategy that is more poverty-focused, lifecycle-oriented, shock-responsive, institutionally coherent and fiscally credible.

The need for a renewed social protection framework has become more urgent in light of Bangladesh’s changing development context. The country is approaching LDC graduation in 2026 and continues to aspire to upper-middle-income status, while the social, economic and demographic conditions that shaped the first NSSS have changed substantially. Sustained inflation, slower real income growth, rapid urbanisation, demographic transition, labor-market informality, climate-related shocks and emerging external risks are placing new pressure on low-income and poor households. Many households remain clustered around the poverty line and have limited capacity to absorb shocks arising from food-price increases, illness, job loss, disability, old age, natural disasters or other forms of income disruption. In this context, social protection must provide predictable, adequate and timely support to people facing poverty, vulnerability and major risks across the lifecycle. The implementation experience of the NSSS 2015 also points to a clear reform agenda for the next phase. Bangladesh has expanded several major allowances, advanced digital payments, initiated selected programme consolidation, and piloted elements of worker protection. However, major structural challenges remain. Genuine social protection spending is still low; resources remain spread across too many small and overlapping schemes; targeting errors and exclusion of poor and vulnerable households persist; benefit levels remain modest and are not systematically adjusted for inflation; urban social protection remains underdeveloped; adaptive and climate-responsive social protection has not yet been mainstreamed; and the development of contributory social insurance for workers remains substantially incomplete. These unfinished reforms underline the need for a strategy that goes beyond broad policy commitments and sets out a disciplined, sequenced and implementable reform pathway.