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BACKGROUND

Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is a blueprint to reduce poverty and multiple deprivations. It was created in 2000 and eight goals were declared that aimed to eradicate poverty, alleviate hunger, reduce gender inequalities, improve health and longevity, overcome environmental degradation and develop global partnerships to achieve the goals (United Nations 2000). Among them, goals 1, 2 and 3 are addressed to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education and gender equality and empower women respectively. Achievement of these goals is directly linked with education and nutrition.

Education is a fundamental human right but, surprisingly, 67 million primary school-aged children were out of school (UNICEF and UNESCO, 2011). Among them 43% was from sub-Saharan Africa and another 27% from south and west Asia. These countries had significant improvement according to MDGs, but during the last several years progress slowed down. Bangladesh has made remarkable improvement in achieving these three goals. The net enrolment in primary education has increased from 60.5% to 98.7% between 1991 and 2011 (UNICEF/UNESCO 2011). The primary completion rate has also increased from 43% to 79.5%. Moreover, Bangladesh has already achieved the target as regards gender parity in primary school education (GED, GoB, 2013). The challenge now is to keep these figures high.