Social Safety Net Programme as a Mean to Alleviate Poverty in Bangladesh

Abstract

The Social Safety Net Programmes (SSNPs) play a key role in Bangladesh to protect the poor households from poverty and vulnerability. Either income poverty or human poverty is responsible for the prevalence of poverty in Bangladesh. The causes of being poor differ across individuals. Taking into account all these factors, the government of Bangladesh is trying to trim down poverty by executing various types of social safety net programmes since her emergence as a new nation. The Government of Bangladesh allocates significant amount of money in the budget to implement various social safety net measures with the motive to attenuate the degree of poverty. The major social safety net programmes in Bangladesh can be divided under two broad categories: (i) social protection measures; (ii) social empowerment measures. All these measures intend to facilitate education, health, vulnerability reduction, employment creation, risk reduction etc. To attain the goal of poverty reduction for the overall welfare of the society better targeting of beneficiaries and better monitoring and supervision must be ensured. There is need for a comprehensive macroeconomic policy response and strong programme management to make the SSNPs work efficiently.

Keywords: Poverty, Social safety net, Bangladesh.