Digital Bangladesh: a govpreneur’s quest for inclusive innovation
“Why did you get married in the first place? And why did you decide to even have me?” 16-year-old Shayan asked his dad jokingly. But this was a question that he had been thinking about for a while now.
Shayan’s dad is Anir Chowdhury, a US tech entrepreneur–turned self-styled Bangladeshi “govpreneur,” currently serving as the policy advisor for the Bangladesh government’s public sector innovation program, a2i.
Born and raised in Bangladesh, Anir went to college in the US initially intending to study physics (mostly because his father, whom he idolized, was a physicist) and then to embark on a life in academia. But he soon realized that he preferred the collective, social nature of problem-solving in applied computer science to the more solitary life of a physicist. After graduating, he founded several tech startups (which were not as “hot” back then as they are now), boasting Fortune 500 companies among their clientele.
Anir now lives and works in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, while Shayan and his mother live in New York. Shayan’s question stems from the fact that since Anir started a2i in 2009 (while visiting Bangladesh to do volunteer work around building the capacity of the local IT industry), he has developed a pattern of visiting his family for only a couple of weeks, twice, or three times a year. What’s more, he makes the audacious attempt to keep New York hours in Dhaka (a ten-hour difference) to help his son out with his studies while doing what is so much more than just a full-time job to him — a2i, his passion, his calling in life.
What is this a2i that motivates Anir to make such an incredible personal sacrifice? a2i started life as a UNDP-designed eGovernance project housed within and implemented by the Prime Minister’s Office as its flagship Digital Bangladesh initiative. It is poised to be formally established as the country’s national public sector innovation agency.
But what does a2i actually do and how does it champion inclusive innovation? To understand that, we must first understand whom a2i works for and the context it works in.
Picture dark grey clouds, pouring rain on a tiny, mud-walled hut in a remote, lush green village. It’s the middle of July and the monsoon season is upon Bangladesh. Peek through the solitary window and you see a young mother, Ferdowsy, still in her teens, sitting on a jaajim[1] upon the floor. Ferdowsy is staring blankly at the ceiling. As her two-month-old daughter sleeps peacefully on her lap, her own mind is restless, her brain pounding. She is struggling to decide whether she should resume working as a domestic helper. It pays a paltry thousand takas a month (approximately US$13) and she desperately needs the money. But what about her baby?
Ferdowsy’s husband Rofik, who pulled rickshaw vans for a living, was killed in a road accident less than a month before the birth of their daughter. The only support she has is the hut they live in which belongs to Rofik’s parents, who are poor sharecroppers, both in their late sixties. Together, they are part of the 3.3 million Bangladeshis living in extreme poverty.
Although she doesn’t know it, Ferdowsy is eligible for maternity allowance (US$5.89 per month) that is provided by the government as part of its social safety net. However, even if she had known, in order to receive this allowance, first she would need to travel nearly 20 km to the subdistrict nirbahi’s (government executive) office just to collect the application form. And this is only half the story. Over the next few visits, she would have to wait for hours in queues, unsure of what the next step was or whom to talk to for getting information, making her an obvious target for unscrupulous middlemen. By the time she would finally complete the application process, Ferdowsy would have had to visit the subdistrict office several times, spanning at least a month and she would spend almost 50 percent of her monthly wage in conveyance fares alone.
This is what the archaic, paper-based public service delivery system expects of a woman applying for maternity allowance. Let alone one who also happens to be a poor widow. In most cases, access to government services starts with citizens having to collect an application form, complete, and submit it along with related documents, photographs of the applicant, and necessary fees. Sounds simple enough. Right?
What does Ferdowsy think? Would it be easy or even make sense for her to leave her two-month-old daughter at home and travel 40 km up and down from the subdistrict government office just to collect a form? No. The mind boggles when one considers how the baby would fare if she opted to take her along.
Next, would Ferdowsy be able to fill up the application? Unclear. She was an eighth-grade dropout, it is unlikely that her application would be flawless.
Where would she get photographed? Not at the office where she got the application form. At the very least, would she be able to pay the necessary fees there? No, that would only be possible at a state-owned bank that was located elsewhere.
Ferdowsy’s challenge in accessing public services was precisely the kind of unsexy, unpopular, far from “cutting-edge” but very real problem that Anir attempted to take on through a2i.
He assembled a team composed of outstanding civil servants hand-picked from different levels of bureaucracy — from the field level all the way up to senior bureaucrats based in the capital — as well as private sector experts (change management, design thinking, IT, mobile money, etc.) and people with experience working with NGOs, academics, and student volunteers.
Together, they created space for experimentation within the public sector in Bangladesh and used insights derived from that experience to design an ecosystem for digital service access that promoted inclusion rather than widening the digital divide.
They developed an “empathy training” course that arranges for relatively senior government officers to act as secret shoppers and visit citizens’ access points for services outside of their ministry or area of expertise. Doctors are sent to schools, teachers to land offices, and land officers to hospitals. Without administrative knowledge or official privileges, officers find themselves in citizens’ shoes as mere customers. This experience helps participants develop a critical eye that they use to scrutinize their own agency’s delivery systems and simplify them by dropping unnecessary steps, prior to digitization. Upon completion of this training, civil servants can also apply for funding to experiment with ideas. The best ideas receive scale-up funding and they are also taken nationally.
They also launched the Bangladesh National Portal which was designed to bring over 42,000 government offices and literally thousands of application forms to the myriad citizen-facing services onto one single web address: www.bangladesh.gov.bd. This made the application forms, like the one Ferdowsy would have had to fill in, available anywhere, anytime, at the click of a button.
But, of course, Ferdowsy is not expected to go online and fill in a digital application form. That was where the Digital Centres — one of the innovations that received scale-up funding — came in. The idea was that people like Ferdowsy would describe what they wanted and the Digital Centre entrepreneurs would look into the National Portal, find the right application forms, fill it in, and submit on behalf of the applicants. Since all the 6,500+ centers (one for every eight to ten villages) were also equipped with digital cameras and functioned as mobile money agents, she would not only be able to get photographed and complete the application process by paying any fees necessary, she would also be able to collect her allowance from the same center as well.
And the same was true for hundreds of other services. The National Portal also featured service profile books on all the 600 e-services that it hosted. The books contained service profiles and process maps. Each profile included information starting from the name of the service provider and average time required for service delivery all the way to contact details of relevant officials for grievance redressal, i.e., in cases of service delivery failure. The process maps offered visual aids to walk them through the steps of accessing a service. Each step of the service delivery procedure was portrayed in a visual format.
The resulting unprecedented, citizen-centered transformation of public services has saved Bangladeshi citizens nearly US$8 billion[2] over the span of the last decade, in terms of TCV[3] reduction alone. For example, in the 131 years between 1873 and 2004, only 8 percent of the Bangladeshi population were registered. Contrast that to the picture painted in ten years between 2009 and 2018: nearly 130 million citizens out of 160 million, an 80 percent coverage, was achieved. The average time to register births went down from over ten days to below five hours, a 98 percent reduction, the average cost went down by 40 percent, and the number of visits to complete a birth registration was reduced by 40 percent.
These tremendous results can be squarely attributed to the availability of an electronic birth registration system (digitization) that was decentralized to the Digital Centres (inclusive means to access services) and crucially, a “nudge” (empathy-driven, citizen-centric innovation) in the form of making birth certificates mandatory for admitting children into primary schools.
In March 2020, COVID-19 reached Bangladesh. With the nation in the grips of its first countrywide lockdown, there were only a couple of RT-PCR[i] labs and a short supply of testing kits. The national information hotline (accessible through and popularly known by its dial in short code “333”) that the a2i team had initially designed as a means for primarily illiterate citizens to seek information about government services and grievance redress was repurposed as a helpline to enable millions of people without smartphones (two-thirds of the Bangladeshi population) to self-report symptoms of the virus.
In an organic way, 333 evolved into a telemedicine line that enabled over half a million COVID-19 patients and 2.4 million pregnant women to receive medical advice. Moreover, the platform was revised several times, including as an emergency response to curb child marriage and to provide food support to families facing food insecurity during lockdowns.
a2i’s 333 also formed the basis for a national, collective data intelligence system that enabled the secure sharing of anonymized data between telecommunications companies and the government to launch syndromic surveillance in order to track disease progression seven to ten days before COVID-19 testing, helping save lives.
Almost equally important to Anir, a2i also helped him realize that the government innovation system was more inclusive than he could ever imagine. As he discovered through his serendipitous foray into public service, there is a major opportunity for ordinary citizens from different walks of life to play a more active role in creating the conditions for a different type of innovation altogether.
Anir’s way of articulating it is,
The world needs more “Govpreneurs.” People who work like private sector entrepreneurs, not just with, but from within, the government, replacing the profit motive with the pursuit of enhancing public value. Individuals who through their creativity, strategy, networking, negotiation and persuasion are able to bring new ideas into government and promote more inclusive innovation policies that are more focused on the nature of the complex challenges we face today rather than single point solutions.
To Anir, the philosophy underpinning Digital Bangladesh embodies this spirit of inclusive innovation. Digital Bangladesh immediately makes one think of a futuristic Bangladesh, one that has 5G internet, 100 percent smartphone penetration, smart homes with smart appliances, AI and robots doing all sorts of household tasks. The Internet of Things (IoT).
Safe to say, that would be the elitist perception of most people who are already economically privileged and educated enough to be aware of the things listed above in the first place.
What is often forgotten is that the majority of people right around the world do not belong to the privileged class. Take the average Bangladeshi — for example, living in a second or third tier town, subdistrict or village — they are not thinking about AI, or 5G internet, or robots, and are frankly not close to being ready for them either, be it due to cost, accessibility, or even skill. Those Bangladeshis are just trying to make their lives a bit better, are trying to get closer to the “digital” lives that their richer, more educated, urban counterparts are living.
That’s how Anir articulates the true purpose of Digital Bangladesh.
As such, the primary mission of Digital Bangladesh is not to improve the internet, or to facilitate e-commerce platforms, or to usher in robots and AI. Rather, it is about designing digital solutions that would help citizens like Ferdowsy, those without internet, those without smartphones, and help bridge that “digital divide” that inhibits even the accessing of public services — one which undoubtedly exists and threatens to widen as a result of the pandemic.
Individuals like Anir who have had the opportunity to serve as Govpreneurs acquire tacit knowledge about how to get things done in government. This knowledge is often difficult to share because the knowledge, skills, and heuristics they acquire are often dependent on the particular context they are operating in. Thus, Anir agreed to an interview for writing this story in part because he feels the best way to scale inclusive innovation is for the innovators to share what they have learned through storytelling or, “reflecting out loud” as he calls it. And in part, it is his way of attempting to entice the reader to consider public service at some point in their career.
Ending where we started, with Shayan. Right after graduating high-school in the fall of 2019, he came to visit his dad for the first time in Dhaka, planning to spend a month. Around the same time, COVID-19 hit and that one month turned into a whole year. Just Shayan and his dad spending more time than they had ever spent together, quality time, “locked down” in an apartment in Dhaka.
And during this time, Shayan got to see up close his dad in action and the impact that his work was creating. One day, over dinner, Shayan quietly said, “Dad, I understand now.”
[1] Bengali for a thin mattress stuffed with cotton that is used as a makeshift bed.
[2] To date, according to calculations by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
[3] A byword for innovation in the Bangladesh Civil Service: innovation equals something that reduces for citizens the “Time” (T) to receive a service from application to final delivery; “cost” © to receive a service including all cost components including real and opportunity costs from application to final delivery; and number of “visits” (V) to various government offices from application to final delivery.
[i] RT-PCR refers to “Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction,” which is a laboratory technique.
This story on Digital Bangladesh was contributed by Ishtiaque Hussain, based at a2i Bangladesh.
This story is featured in “Inclusive Innovation”, published first by Routledge Press and coauthored by Robyn Klingler-Vidra (Senior Lecturer, King’s College London), Alex Glennie (Principal Researcher, Nesta), and Courtney Savie Lawrence (Climate and Systems Innovation Consultant, Cofounder Circular Design Lab).
Why this, why now? Innovation offers potential: to cure diseases, to better connect people, and to make the way we live and work more efficient and enjoyable. At the same time, innovation can fuel inequality, decimate livelihoods, and harm mental health. This book contends that inclusive innovation — innovation motivated by environmental and social aims — is able to uplift the benefits of innovation while reducing its harms.
For us, the term “inclusive innovation” describes the pursuit of innovation that has social (and environmental) aims, and local context, at its heart. As we strive to bridge the gaps in practice, we are focused on also recalibrating a mismatch in language and lexicon. We believe that in some cases, those who are doing inclusive innovation are not adequately acknowledged, and so policy is not designed as effectively as it could be, and more generally, the ecosystem is not as collaborative, or inclusive, as it has the potential to be.
Want to download the complementary ‘Authors’ Copy’ and join the LinkedIn Community of Practice? More at inclusiveinnovation.io
