Development, development of Bangladesh, economic growth of Bangladesh, Economy of Bangladesh

The Prime Minister's private Industry & Investment Advisor Salman F Rahman spoke about future possibilities of freelancing in Bangladesh. He gave a strong speech lately. He said that the economic achievement of which Bangladesh has been able to succeed in doing these in last 10 or 11 years, are actually phenomenal. We have grown at a rate of 7% plus over the last ten years;and last year, last fiscal year we grew at 8%. The Asian Development Bank has recently said, in the Asia Pacific region, Bangladesh has the highest growth. HSBC bank has done a projection of 75 countries that how their growth rate will be over the next 15 years upto 2035. And in that project, they are saying that they have created a model and they are saying that Bangladesh will grow, will be the single country in the whole world which will grow at the highest rate possible in the next 15 year. The figures actually speak for themselves. I will not go too deep into this as you all know it, but just small few things, our export from 6 billion dollars and now today we are exporting 40 billion dollars. Foreign remittance was 8 billion dollars, today are going to cross; this year will cross 20 billion dollars. Our GDP has more than doubled and most important, and this is the most important that whatever the government is doing all this growth which being done, the benefit of all these must go to every single citizen. And one of the most two important statistics, which make me very, very proud and I will say that both of these very shortly. The first one is that, in the last 11 years from 56% poverty, we have reduced our poverty rate to 22% and absolute poverty which is abject poverty, we have been able to reduce to 11% and in fact in the next 3 to 4 years, we will completely eliminate absolute poverty insha’Allah.

The other statistic, I am very proud of, the World Economic Forum recently published the global gender gap index and on women empowerment and Bangladesh ranks at 48th and it is the highest in the south Asia. So our gender gap index is higher than India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, in South Asia, we are number one but what makes me very proud is that we are 48th on that index, the US is 51. So we are even better than the United States. So, enough of what we have achieved, I would like to talk to you about the challenges of the future. One of the weaknesses of our economy is that our export is dependent on a single item. As you know of our total exports, 85% of our exports are garments. We are trying to diversify our exports and we looking for other things, but what do we do we have to face this challenge other than diversification exports else can we do. Honorable Prime Minister realized this long ago and as you know she said that she wants to make Bangladesh digital and when this was said, it was, lot of people laughed, there was a lot of skepticism that Bangladesh and digital is something it’s a dream. It cannot happen. Today Bangladesh has a fiber optic backbone to all the unions of the country. We have over 5000 unions, over 3,500 unions have now data centers, and we have a digital backbone. Because of this, what is happening is a very new area, which I was talking about export diversification new area has developed. The other day, a young man came to me and said, “sir, I am freelancer.” I said very good,so he says “sir I went to on the online and got a job. There was lady in France, she has a flower shop. She asked me to develop a web page for me and I’ll give you five hundred dollars.” So I said very good. “But I have a problem sir,” and what’s your problem?.“So I developed the web design and I sent it to her, she liked it very much and then she sent me my five hundred dollars to my bank.” So I said very good, what’s your problem? He says,“the bank won’t give me my money.” So I said why will the bank not give your the money? so he says “the bank is asking me how do you know this lady? why did she send you the money? “so then he says, “sir, I have got more problems.” I said okay; what’s your another problem?So he says “socially nobody accepts us.”So I said why?He says,“I want to get married but my father-in-la say what do you do? So I said I am a freelancer. So he said what’s a freelancer, so he says I work at home. So where is your appointment letter? Who do you work for? What is your office hour? So he say “I earn money more than many people who have an appointment letter and who goes to office but I work at home and I make much more money.”He said“no, no, no; very fishy what you do. I am not interested in getting my daughter married to you.”So I said okay, we need to find out a solution. So I spoke to Sajib Wazed Joy, our honorable ICT adviser and to our state minister for ICT and I said why can’t we get all these freelancers create a database and register them and give them a registration. Then I called all the bankers, I called the central bank and I said that if we give them this registration, will you have a problem? they said no sir if you can give them a registration, it will be very easy for us and when they get this kind of money and information, no problem, we will be able to disburse the funds to them. So that’s very good, we are creating this database, inshallah, in two to three weeks’ time, we will be launching this database where freelancers will be registered in Bangladesh and you will be surprised when I first took this initiative, people told me there are over two to three hundred thousands freelancers in Bangladesh. I am sure among the audience, today I see all young people, I am sure there are freelancers sitting today in front of us. What now we are told we have over a million freelancers in Bangladesh. And we are now getting fugues that these freelancers are actually earning more than two billion dollars from the work they are doing but because it is informal, it is not being captured.

So we are not trying to create an environment where this IT enable services is going to be future, it is going to be the next garment revolution for Bangladesh. And it is very,very important. Why it is very important?Because we are coming upto the fourth industrial revolution where you are getting artificial intelligence, you are getting robotics, quantum computing, nanotechnology. We have to prepare for this challenge and the honorable prime minister has recently taken a decision that we will start teaching coding to our children in the primary school level. You see, what is coding? Coding is nothing but a language and this language was much faster than grown-ups do. If we can start teaching coding at primary school level, by the time they come to secondary school, there will be programmers and we have to create an army of programmers if we have to face the fourth Industrial revolution. So, we are doing all of this and I am running out of time according to the spoken these subjects are very passionate thing which I believe in for long time but what I would like to just end by saying, let us all unite and face the future challenge and take Bangladesh and make Bangladesh, inshallah, into a superpower of the world.