Bangladesh Municipality Development Fund: A Success Story For Sustainable Urban Development

There are 313 municipalities in four major cities in Bangladesh according to 2010 government statistics. These municipalities are containing from at least 50,000 people in their own jurisdiction area up to 10 million in case of Dhaka municipality. The municipalities are being treated as the local government body to provide services for urbanites and to collect revenues for the central government. Meeting the vital needs to the urbanites is a key element of a sustainable urban development. But the notion of needs is in itself a diffuse and problematic concept in the poorly budgeted municipalities in Bangladesh. Still there are good practices to ensure the harmonized development in urban areas in Bangladesh considering the poor governance, lack of capacity and skilled manpower and inadequate budget. This paper tries to focus the success stories of Bangladesh Municipality Development Fund (BMDF) for sustainable urban development in Bangladesh through financing infrastructure development in municipalities as well as recovering the grants given by donor agencies as a participatory program. This paper also emphasizes the need of such a very good organization in one of the poorest nations to ensure the public money be utilized for better infrastructural development and civil works to attain harmonize and sustainable urban development. The experiences of Bangladesh might be very useful in similar countries in the world that are having economic problems, poor governance and lack of transparency of using public money for a sustainable urban infrastructure development.