ABSTRACT

Bangladesh has experienced a silent revolution in public health. Maternal mortality has been cut by 75 percent since 1980, infant mortality has halved since 1990, and the total fertility rate has fallen to 2.2 in 2012 (UNICEF, n.d.a) from about 7 in the 1970s (United States. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 1993). Such a level of achievement in reducing child and maternal mortality has had barely any precedent in modern history, except that of the Japanese attainments during the nineteenth-century Meiji restoration ( The Economist, 2012). In 2010, the United Nations recognized Bangladesh’s extraordinary progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the reduction of child and maternal mortality (Chowdhury et al., 2013).