Bangladesh, Burma and the Rohingya crisis Looking more broadly at DFID’s work in Bangladesh, the situation was more positive. Bangladesh recently graduated to lower middle-income status, after many years of sustained economic growth, and a ‘development success’ story in-the-making, has been confirmed. The positive gesture made towards the Rohingya, in the spirit of international humanitarian norms, must not be allowed to be the cause, real or perceived, of any lessening of Bangladesh’s development trajectory. We pull no punches, Bangladesh has plenty of other challenges to the quantity, equality and sustainability of its economic performance and we touch on these: persisting extreme poverty; unequal wealth distribution; restrictions on open society; abuses of human rights; abuse, discrimination and violence against women and girls; corruption and—looming over it all—threats from both insidious and shocking climate change-related disasters. However, there was a lot of energy and confidence in the people we met, the projects we visited and the places we travelled through. Our perceptions and our evidence indicate to us that the work of DFID in Bangladesh is well-targeted, at or around the challenges we identified, and appropriately agile, working to demonstrate, showcase and promote good practices (rather than attempt, with limited resources, the heavy-lifting). DFID works alongside many partners, both international and local, but perhaps head and shoulders above the rest is BRAC, Bangladesh’s homegrown development facility, now the biggest NGO in the world. The strategic partnership between DFID and BRAC, now into its second 5-year tranche, should be studied and its lessons and virtues replicated where appropriate. 5