National Household Survey 2017

Abstract

This 2017 survey is the 8th of this series. It is observed that 66.5% of households in Bangladesh experienced corruption when receiving services from public and private organisations. In the health sector, 42.5% of household experienced corruption.

Methodology

TI Bangladesh followed a three-stage stratified cluster sampling method for selecting sampled households across the country.

The Integrated Multi-purpose Sampling Frame (IMPS) developed by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) was used as the sampling frame.

At first stage, villages or mohallas for each of 16 strata were selected randomly from IMPS. The number of strata was determined by dividing 8 divisions into rural and urban sections. The number of villages or mohallas for each of the stratum was determined in proportion to the respective population weight after Square Root transformation.

At second stage, each selected village or mohalla was divided into some segments or clusters of 100 households as required by the number of households in the village or mohalla. After that, a segment of 100 households was selected randomly.

At third stage, 12 households were selected following systematic random sampling from selected segment or cluster. The sample size for the survey was determined following 2015 survey parameters at 5% margin of error.

Findings

1. 86.0% of the surveyed households received health services, among those 50.0% received services from government healthcare institutions, 77.3% from private institutions and 2.5% from NGOs.
2. Among the households that received health services from government institutions, 42.5% had become victims of corruption.
3. Among the service recipient households, 19.8% had to pay bribe or extra money, 8.4% were advised unduly to go to private clinics or diagnostic centers, and 7.5% could not find a doctors/nurse/CHCP when required.
4. The highest portion of households that received health services from government institutions experienced various types of corrupt practices (45.0%) in Medical College Hospitals, which is 42.6% in District General Hospitals and 42.0% in Community Clinics.

Recommendations

1. Steps should be taken to provide both positive and negative incentives to prevent corruption. At the same time, rewards and punishments must be given on the basis of performance.
2. To ensure transparency and accountability of service-providing agencies, activities like public hearings should be made more common. Local people have to be in dialogue with agencies and actively participate in monitoring these services.
3. Institutions must adopt their own Code of Conduct. Accountability and transparency must be ensured on this basis.
4. To increase people’s awareness and participation against corruption, social movements against corruption needs to be strengthened.