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Paging Doctor Koi
Background
Bangladesh is not a country we hear about every day in the news — and when we do, it probably has something to do with floods, cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, fires and tsunamis.
What we don’t hear about as much, or at all, is the incredible human talent, resourcefulness and innovation of a country that has expanded its GDP nearly six-fold in the past 20 years. This is the country that birthed Dr. Mohammad Yunus, the Nobel Laureate and pioneer of microcredit and microfinance, and created the infrastructure that allowed some of the first microinsurance policies to come to life.
It has a young and vibrant population of nearly 165 million people, and they are eager and hungry to do more — but there is a problem, and I think you know where this is going.
Healthcare is an area where Bangladesh is lagging — yes, the country has made impressive strides in the past 30 years, totally inverting the share of disease burden from mostly acute and infectious to chronic and non-communicable. Today, deaths from ischemic heart disease and stroke together outweigh all deaths caused from infectious disease or accidents (caveat: pre-COVID).
That being said, healthcare in Bangladesh is very fragmented, heavily reliant on NGOs, woefully short-staffed (and concentrated in urban areas when it is), and analog. This…
