Authors - Zarif Wasif Bhuiyan, MD. Humayun Kabir, Paramita Saha, Md Mahbub Alam, Mahady Hasan Abstract - Urban–rural evidence in Bangladesh is often fragmented or short-lived, limiting its value for tracking change. This study leverages the Life in the Field Experience at Independent University, Bangladesh to build a pre-COVID baseline from eight annual waves of student-collected surveys spanning 2013–2020 across six districts: Jessore, Bogra, Mymensingh, Sylhet, Barishal, and Dinajpur. Heterogeneous spreadsheets are harmonized into standardized sector indices for education, medications and health service use, employment, marital history, acute morbidity, and chronic morbidity. A transparent pipeline handles header inconsistencies, variable shifts, and missingness, producing comparable annual series. ARIMA models are estimated for Jessore to generate five-year projections and are interpreted alongside cross-district benchmarking using z-scores. Results show steady gains in education that level off, an employment dip followed by recovery, rising medication use, low and stable acute morbidity, a gradual increase in chronic morbidity, and largely stable marital patterns. Forecasts are framed as extensions of pre-COVID dynamics with explicit uncertainty. The pipeline provides a reusable template for short annual series and supports policy diagnosis at district level. Future work will extend forecasting to all districts, incorporate structural-break tests and hierarchical models, and enrich indices with external covariates and administrative validation.
