Staff Reporter:
Education and Primary and Mass Education Minister Dr ANM Ehsanul Haque Milon has said the historic friendship between Bangladesh and China could be more sustainable through strengthen-ing cooperation in the areas of educational and technology.
The minister said this while addressing the inaugural session of the Second China-Bangladesh Roundtable on Governance Experience Exchange at a city hotel yesterday.
The event has been arranged aimed at strengthening bilateral cooperation in education, human resource development, blue economy and disaster management.
Highlighting Bangladesh’s demographic dividend, the minister said around 65 percent of the coun-try’s population is young. Development of the workforce into internationally skilled human re-sources through giving technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is a key priority of the incumbent government, he said.
Referring to his recent visit to China, Milon said the government has taken initiatives to make the country’s technical institutions with international standard by taking lesson from China’s close in-dustry-academia links. Memorandums of understanding (MoUs) were signed with several Chinese institutions in this regard, he said.
The government planned to gradually raise education spending from two percent to five percent of GDP and significant share of the allocation has been allotted for improving the quality of technical education, the minister said.
“Plans are also underway to establish a specialized university focusing on the blue economy to har-ness the economic potential of the Bay of Bengal”, he added.
Former Home Minister and Patuakhali-1 MP Air Vice Marshal (retd.) Altaf Hossain Chowdhury, Dhaka University Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr ABM Obaidul Islam, Chinese Embassy Cultural Counsellor Li Shaopeng and Vice-President of Shanghai Institutes for International Studies Dr Li Kaisheng also spoke on the occasion.
