Katalyst for development in Bangladesh
Much of the huge development success seen over the past decades has been achieved thanks to innovative solutions that have been scaled up.
Conditional cash transfer programs like Brazil’s Bolsa Família have proved effective in reducing poverty and ensuring that children attend school and are vaccinated. Innovative financing mechanisms supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others have contributed to the immunization of hundreds of millions of children. UNITAID has pioneered financial schemes such as the airlines ticket levy to fund lifesaving medicines. Muhammad Yunus and others made microcredit a worldwide tool for credits to those who in the past were considered too poor for a bank loan.
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BPC joint letter commending alliance for worker safety
The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (Alliance) has made great progress toward protecting workers and improving garment factory safety, say former Senators George Mitchell (D-ME), Co-founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), BPC Senior Fellow, in a letter issued by the BPC to Alliance Independent Chair Ellen Tauscher.
The BPC, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank actively promoting bipartisanship and respectful dialogue, helped give rise to the Alliance in 2013 through a series of discussions convened by Senators Mitchell and Snowe. The non-profit was instrumental in laying out the aggressive timeline and milestones for the Alliance’s five-year effort.
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Nobel prize given for Brain’s Positioning System
John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.
O’Keefe, who holds U.S. and U.K. citizenship, and the Mosers, who are Norwegian, will share the 8 million-krona ($1.1 million) prize, the Nobel Assembly said today in Stockholm. O’Keefe will receive half the amount, and the Mosers, who are married, will share the other half.
Last year’s Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to three U.S. scientists -- James Ro...
Last year’s Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to three U.S. scientists -- James Ro...
Higher education and economic productivity in Bangladesh
Prof Muhammad Mahboob Ali, PhD
Bangladesh is gradually progressing in higher education. Let me here quote Confucius: “He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” For last five and eight months , lot of initiatives have been taken by the Government of Bangladesh .The most pertaining questions are contribution of higher education in last five and eight months in the country and whether rise of golden GPA 5 in SSC and HSC level creates any sort of debacle in the education sector? In search of these research questions the study has been taken by the center of Break through thinking in Bangladesh. An opinion pool has been conducted by the Center for Breakthrough thin...
Sloth bears confirmed extinct in Bangladesh
A massive project to assess the health of wildlife in Bangladesh has confirmed conservationists’ longstanding suspicions that sloth bears no longer exist in that country.
Sloth bears (Melursus ursinus) could once be found throughout India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. (A separate subspecies lives on the island nation of Sri Lanka.) Overhunting during the British colonial rule caused all populations of this lanky, shaggy, white-snouted species to crash by the end of the 19th century.
Wealth without workers, workers without wealth
TECHNOLOGICAL revolutions are best appreciated from a distance. The great inventions of the 19th century, from electric power to the internal-combustion engine, transformed the human condition. Yet for workers who lived through the upheaval, the experience of industrialisation was harsh: full of hard toil in crowded, disease-ridden cities.
The modern digital revolution—with its hallmarks of computer power, connectivity and data ubiquity—has brought iPhones and the internet, not crowded tenements and cholera. But, as our special report explains, it is disrupting and dividing the world of work on a scale not seen for more than a century. Vast wealth is being created without many workers; and for all but an elite few, work no longer guarantees a rising income.
