Improving skills and productivity are crucial to Bangladesh’s quest to accelerate economic growth and become a middle-income country. However, the current skill levels of the labor force are unlikely to support future market demands. While there is an abundance of low-skilled workers, there is a strong demand for graduates with higher cognitive and non-cognitive skills and job-specific technical skills. This would require improving the quality and relevance of tertiary education so that education institutions are equipped to produce graduates with more market relevant skills.
To meet the human development needs of the country, the College Education Development Project (CEDP) was incepted in 2016. The CEDP aims to strengthen the strategic planning and management capacity of the college education subsector and to improve the teaching and learning environment of participating colleges.The Project specifically focuses on the tertiary college education sector under the National University (NU) which accounts for nearly two-thirds of all tertiary students in around 2,200 government and nongovernment colleges in Bangladesh.
The CEDP is under the Ministry of Education and co-executed by the National University and the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh. Other key partners include Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education (DSHE), Bangladesh Open University (BOU), National Academy for Educational Management (NAEM), University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC).
The total project cost is US$ 130 million of which the World Bank is financing US$ 100 million and the remaining (US$ 30 million) by the Government of Bangladesh. The project implementation period
July 2016- December 2023.
