Bangladesh has 152 public and private universities teaching around four million students


in the country and engage with wider stakeholders. They also need to innovate and improvise, not only in terms of technology, but also in the services they provide, policies they create to follow, money they arrange, and their overall relationship with the researchers. And, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offers an exciting opportunity for the academic libraries to support their hosts’ research ventures.


Academic libraries’ support to measure country’s development Bangladesh did well in achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) during 2000−2015. That gave Bangladesh the confidence to embrace the SDGs Framework as it was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. The 17 SDGs have a total of 169 targets. Each target is supposed to be measured against one to five indicators with a total of 242 indicators. Bangladesh has developed a monitoring framework and SDG Tracker to do so. But, a recent analysis shows that the country does not have data on many of those indicators. In fact, for 47 per cent of


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“Tracking the progress towards the SDGs is


essentially a way of defining a country’s development”


indicators, data is only partially available or needs further analysis; another 23 per cent of indicators have no data available at all. Tracking the progress towards the SDGs


is essentially a way of defining a country’s development. With incomplete data on indicators, measuring Bangladesh’s development is also incomplete. At the moment, the Government of Bangladesh only relies upon its ministries and agencies, and on the UN and other international agencies in limited cases, to receive SDG-related data. The government, therefore, needs to widen its data sources. This gives academic and research


institutes an unprecedented opportunity to get involved in this SDG venture to


do what they are best at doing – data collection, analysis, interpretation and most importantly, building evidence. Further, the SDGs are also guiding the research agenda globally. No new data, knowledge and evidence generation is possible without strong support from academic libraries – a role becoming more crucial than ever before. Academic libraries need to


appreciate these new dimensions and responsibilities. Interactions among researchers and librarians can help both understand the requirements for effective research in the SDG era. At the same time, academic libraries need to create a stronger brand through collaboration, innovation, and leadership, thus growing out of their conventional persona and positioning themselves to impactfully support SDG research.


Haseeb Md Irfanullah is an independent consultant on environment, climate change, and research systems and a visiting research fellow for the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. This article is based upon the author’s presentation at a webinar jointly organised by Cornell University Library and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) on 5 December.


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