How Can Digital Innovations Improve the Economy of Bangladesh?


In December 2008, the Government of Bangladesh introduced the vision ‘Digital Bangladesh by 2021’ to leverage the Internet to improve the delivery of its services, particularly among the poor people. A quiet revolution in digitizing its health sector is already under way to strengthen the Health Information System (HIS), which enables real-time monitoring of population health.

The Internet could provide solutions to a number of structural problems besetting Bangladesh’s health sector. For example, the use of ICT to provide remote diagnosis, advice, treatment, and health education could address a major part of the health issues of patients in rural clinics, which are typically the most poorly staffed. Online tools and mobile innovations can improve the operational efficiency and productivity of (rural) health system by enabling more effective service delivery.

The use of ICT in education has a similar potential to deliver rapid gains in access to education, teacher training, and learning outcomes. As pointed above, web-based school management systems that can support standardization and monitoring of school performance could enable the government to achieve more with their education budgets and providing millions of students with the foundation for a better future.

It is clear that the digital age and its associated variables are continuously getting integrated into our economy and society. Due to the limitations of data, only a snapshot of the impact on education and healthcare of Bangladesh is shown in The Economy of Tomorrow Digital Innovations and Their Implications for the Economy of Bangladesh.

All of the available sources show that to make a dramatic shift in these two sectors, incorporation of digitized materials is one of the most important factors of current time. However, there are many questions regarding the impact of the digital age in the socioeconomic conditions of Bangladesh that still remained unsolved.

For example:

  • How do we quantify the impact that the internet and internet driven business have on a country’s GDP?
  • How does a digitized registration process reduce corruption?
  • What will the legal system of the country look like when digitization will take place there? Is the internet creating a divergence among the different groups of people?
  • How much of labor hours are people wasting doing unproductive works on the internet?
  • For every new digital adoption, someone may be getting a new job, whereas someone, somewhere may be losing his/her job. So what if the rate of losing jobs is far greater than the rate of creating employment opportunities?

The answer to these questions require further research, including reviewing the experiences of other countries where these questions have already been addressed. However, one thing is clear that these topics will dominate the research agendas in the upcoming years and their findings will help Bangladesh to transform into a more balanced, robust and sustainable economic growth.