A Conversation with Anir Chowdhury, Policy Advisor to Bangladesh’s Flagship Digital Transformation Program
Thought Piece #3: The advisor to Bangladesh’s a2i (Aspire to Innovate) Program talks about powering digital government through community engagement, political will and public-private partnerships…
One of interweave.gov’s founding aims was to broaden the scope of discussion about Digital Government in Asia and Europe beyond well-known and frequently discussed examples, and to look at how countries have achieved successful digital transformation in different contexts. Where better to start, then, than with Anir Chowdhury, the Policy Advisor to Bangladesh’s flagship digital transformation program a2i, accompanied by Manik Mahmud, head of a2i’s Customer Innovation Lab.
Our wide-ranging discussion covered everything from working with sugar cane farmers on public-private partnerships to horizon scanning for novel forms of digital lock-in risk. Bangladesh’s digital story is one of cross-sector collaboration, strong political backing, and humble experimentation.
Bangladesh has experienced tremendous digitization over the past decade and a half, issuing 100M+ digital IDs to over 125M internet-savvy residents, launching 1500+ government eServices, and building the 9th largest mobile consumer market in the world. Sitting down with the a2i team, we expected an hour filled with technical discussions and tales of innovative developers. Instead, Anir Chowdhury sounded as much business school professor as policy advisor, doling out theories of organizational change and citing Bangladesh’s success as rooted in community engagement and multi-stakeholder collaboration.
“Help us help you”: Designing for Citizens and Involving them in Service Delivery
From almost the moment our discussion begins, Chowdhury’s emphasis on Bangladesh’s digital program supporting the underserved is front and center of his responses. He begins by framing two opposing realities of digital transformation: digital as success and digital as distraction.
If the aim of digital is to serve those who have received “the short end of the stick” and “leave no one behind,” he argues, then digitalizing in the wrong way can do the exact opposite.
He gives the example of using blockchain for land registration. In an attempt to tackle the problem of “land-grabbers” – rich individuals and businesses who might unfairly claim land in Bangladesh – the government decided a few years ago to introduce blockchain as an anti-corruption “panacea.” However, far from solving the problem, a spike in corruption at the point at which data is transferred into the blockchain ensured that it was enshrined immutably as a permanent “source of truth.”
We are often used to thinking about ‘lock-in’ in terms of legacy systems and incumbent suppliers. Here, Bangladesh’s blockchain land records provided a quite different form of technological lock-in to derail digital progress.
To mitigate the recurrence of such risks today, the Bangladeshi approach attempts to define the “right form” of digitalization through consistent citizen engagement, from defining problems to delivering solutions.
Take for example Bangladesh’s sugar cane farmers. Since the 1930s, farmers had received purchase orders via slips of paper to notify them to bring their produce to sugar cane mills. Through a combination of corruption and incompetency, they would often receive these slips at incorrect times, leading to their produce drying up and profits plummeting when their sugar cane was left at the gates too early.
Faced with these inefficiencies, a2i began work on solving the specific problem of getting purchase orders to sugar cane farmers on time back in 2009. They found the solution in a simple text service, implementing it in lieu of a wider-sweeping change like an ERP system which would have digitized things like payroll and inventory.
Payment slips began to be sent by SMS, and these text messages began to serve as legal contracts. 200K+ farmers benefited from this, and mill yields increased by 13%+. “Co-designing with farmers for a specific problem was a key factor to why this was successful” Chowdhury remarks.
Perhaps the most compelling manifestation of co-designing with citizens is a2i’s Service Process Simplification (SPS), its “innovative tool for reducing citizens’ hassle.”
“We took a page out of the Business Process Reengineering model and decided to rebrand it to SPS” explains Chowdhury.
SPS involves a2i and thousands of civil servants working with citizens to map out service delivery chains end-to-end, removing redundant steps and reengineering processes to increase citizen accessibility by reducing ‘TCV’ - the time, cost and number of visits - required to access government services. “We empathize with citizens, then simplify the process through SPS, then digitize” says Chowdhury, adding that this formula has been foundational to a2i’s success.
In some instances, the government has moved beyond co-designing digital services with citizens into co-production. Until recently, scaling digital government services reached a bottleneck in citizens’ lack of ability to access these services. Rather than sweeping infrastructure changes, a2i realized that cutting intermediary costs via citizen involvement was one avenue to mitigate this.
The government has since instituted more than 9,000 franchised kiosks known as Digital Centers to support over 6 million citizens a month in receiving hundreds of federal digital services. This began with digital birth registration, and now includes e-commerce, accessing bank loans and viewing exam results. These kiosks, which cut the distance citizens need to travel to access services, were first introduced in rural areas and are run by private citizens who formally partner with the government. This allows the government to maintain oversight while giving private citizens substantial buy-in in promoting the services.
Further provisions were made for gender parity in running these kiosks, meaning that more female customers are able to access and use digital services (the government had observed that there was a significant difference in how comfortable women felt being served by female sales representatives vs. male ones).
Unlocking Scale through Private Sector Collaboration
It is apparent during our conversation with Chowdhury and Mahmud that strong political backing has both facilitated and is facilitated by close collaboration with citizens.
“There is political will partly because a2i was a whole-of-government initiative that started from the Honorable Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina herself. There was also strong support from the ICT Advisor to the PM (Sajeeb Wazed), the ICT State Minister (Zunaid Ahmed Palak), and the UNDP from the onset,” Chowdhury notes. “This will has sustained for over a decade and has percolated through the government.”
Getting buy-in was no walk in the park, however. Recounting the initial derision a2i faced from media and civil society groups, Chowdhury tells a story of a workshop he ran fifteen years ago involving participants from sixteen ministries. “This [a2i] won’t help. Food security, poverty, rule of law…these are what we need to be focusing on. Not digitization,” asserted one of the participants. Five days and one workshop later, the “senior-most government official” had changed his tune, and became a firm backer of the usefulness of SPS in visualizing his department's bottlenecks.
Slowly winning people’s trust continues to be important work for a2i, especially when it comes to private sector support, which has supercharged the development of a robust public technology ecosystem.
In 2010, a2i launched a project to establish smart classrooms to augment student learning outcomes. It had an internal budget to pilot this in just 7 schools, until a telco stepped in and provided enough runway for 400. “400 schools was a good number to take to the Ministry of Education to show that this was working,” Chowdhury explains. “Because of this, the Ministry allocated $45M to scale this digitization to 23K schools and train 60K teachers.”
In early 2020, when it became crucial for the Bangladeshi government to know how COVID was proliferating through the country, digitization and private sector support also proved critical.
“We needed data as we did not have enough PCR labs in the country” recounts Chowdhury. With the help of 4 telcos, Bangladesh’s national hotline – 333 – was turned into a COVID reporting system. “We developed an AI system with the telcos to transform incoming call data into a determination of virus hotspots and best next steps for mitigating spread.”
Most recently, a2i has also become home to iLab – an innovation unit within a2i – which supports students, startups and researchers to “bring any innovation to life. There have been prototypes for low cost ambulances, soil testing kits, and smart walking sticks for the visually impaired.” Almost three hundred innovations have been funded in just 3 years thanks to support from the private sector and academia.
A Humble Approach to Achieving Big Dreams
As we reach the end of our hour-long conversation, Chowdhury’s discussions of Bangladesh’s GovTech turn philosophical. Referencing William Easterly’s Planners vs. Searchers model – the former being a ‘West knows best’ philosophy, the latter being one that says ‘I don’t know what’s best, let me find out from our citizens’ – Chowdhury doubles down on a2i’s commitment to remain a ‘searcher,’ to involve citizens in defining and solving problems, and to experiment along the way.
“a2i is at an exciting time and is core to our Vision 2041. We will become an agency not dependent on government subsidies, we will have our own revenue,” finishes Chowdhury, answering a question about next steps for the program.
As a2i grows, we can expect Bangladesh’s public technology ecosystem to grow alongside it, supercharging the country’s graduation from its status as an LDC.