ABSTRACT
Compared to many developing nations, Bangladesh scored strongly in reducing poverty and other goals of the UN MDGs program over 2000 and 2015. Bangladesh has major initiatives now to implement several projects to make the United Nation's plan of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda a grand success. To make SDGs a success, there is only nine years to go to 2030. In order to transform Bangladesh into a higher-middle-income country by 2030 per its ambitious Vision 2041, the government needs to create an effective domestic education agenda in order to develop a critical mass of globally competent citizens. While the country has been pursuing the vision in the aim of transforming itself into a developed economy with sustainable economic growth and consistent improvement of human and social development indicators by the year 2041, the new generation will need to compete with their peers around the world according to a dialogue jointly organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Bangladesh and the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), an international development NGO in 2014. Keeping these in mind, this chapter investigates the challenges of a different kind, which Bangladesh cannot live in an indefinite period. In other words, the present Rohingya refugee crisis. The nation now is sheltering more than 1.1 million refugees thrown out from Rakhine province of Myanmar. There is not much space here to illustrate the political aspect of the crisis. This issue by now well covered in the world media. But what we would like to address now is the Bangladesh's Rohingya conundrum and Australia's role in extending a hand towards Bangladesh in solving the crisis in a respectable manner since Australia has very good friendly relations with both Myanmar and Bangladesh. Before coming to this point, one needs to know what is at stake for Bangladesh if the crisis drags on for an indefinite period like in other parts of the world. To examine this, it is needed first to look at Bangladesh's socio-economic ascendancy over the last two decades and identify if the crisis can bring economic and political risks to the nation in the near future.
