The recent socio economic success story of Bangladesh has been widely acknowledged locally and internationally. 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 over 6% over the last five years despite the general global slowdown. Over the same period per capita income has increased from $638 in 2009 to over $1000 in 2013.
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 identifies the need to increase investments in infrastructure from around 2% to 6% of GDP as one of the key requirements to achievement of the vision. Therefore, the government has identified and prioritised the Public Private Partnership (PPP) as one of the key initiatives to meet this investment priority and close the infrastructure gap.
Bangladesh's success has been built on the foundations of a very dynamic and vibrant private sector. The public sector has worked together with the private sector in different modalities in delivering infrastructure projects for nearly two decades. As such it is keen to build on this strength and forge a lasting partnership between the public and private sector for the accelerated development of our country. Through the PPP program the government intends to pursue opportunities that benefit the private sector through generating a profitable revenue stream one that delivers to its citizens much needed social and economic public infrastructure services and fulfil the commitment of government to meet its social obligations and development imperatives.