The socio economic success story of Bangladesh has been widely acknowledged. On the social front Bangladesh has made significant strides in meeting several of the UN Millennium Development Goals such as reducing income disparity ratio, attaining gender parity in education, reduction in infant mortality etc. In addition, Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in reducing the prevalence of underweight children, increasing enrolment at primary schools, lowering the maternal mortality ratio and improving immunization coverage.
On the economic front it is one of the few countries to have demonstrated consistently strong GDP growth rate averaging well over 6% over the last five years despite the general global slowdown. Over the same period per capita income has increased from $685 in 2009 to over $1390 in 2015.
The foundation to this path of socio-economic growth, success and prosperity for Bangladesh has been set out in the Vision 2021; the Vision that sees Bangladesh progress to a middle income country by the year 2021. The strategy for implementing Vision 2021 and the 6th Five Year Plan identifies the need to increase investments in infrastructure from 2% to 6% of GDP as one of the key requirements to achievement of the Vision.
Given the size of the proposed increase in investment required, Government budgets alone were insufficient to deliver the infrastructure envisioned in the timescales necessary and it therefore identified and prioritised Public Private Partnerships as one of the key initiatives to bridge the gap between the identified investment need and the available Government resources and to accelerate delivery.