Bangladesh is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its independence in 2021. An awe-inspiring story of a country born out of the language movement and its collective consciousness for preserving the culture of Bengal Delta after a tumultuous past of being East Pakistan for 24 years before gaining its freedom in 1971. Ravaged by natural calamities, famine, floods, and military coups—today it can be safely said that Bangladesh has traversed well from a state of despair to reaching its own tryst with destiny.

The power of compounding as it is called in the area of investing, is clearly visible in the way progress has helped this nation of 165 million people pull a large percentage of people out of abject poverty, improve the quality of their lives, become almost self-sufficient in food availability and deploy Ready-Made-Garments (RMG) as the most celebrated lever of economic and social transformation.

Having been in Bangladesh for the last four odd years and having travelled across the length and breadth of the country, I strongly believe that Bangladesh's time has come, and the next 10 years would be nothing like any of the past decades and will prove to be the "Swarno Dashak" in the glorious history of this proud nation.

Technology step-up and digitalisation

Who could have predicted that penetration of mobile phone, the ubiquitous sign of digital adoption would reach 100 percent in Bangladesh, ahead of other South Asian countries? What is significant is more than 40 percent of those connections are now on a smart phone. And those who don't have a smart phone cite an interesting reason—absence of a need to own a smart phone and not affordability. I am reminded of an interesting book by the name Bridgital Nation: Solving Technology's People Problem, written by N Chandra (with Roopa Purushothaman), Chairman of Tata Sons. The book offers a brilliant, cutting-edge approach that can address Bangladesh's biggest challenges by bridging the chasm between rural and urban communities, the different levels of education and medical access, and between aspirations and achievement. Look no further than millions of daily transactions moving thousands of crores of taka on Mobile-Wallets (bKash, Nagad, Rocket etc.) to appreciate this phenomenon. In simple language, think of it as an "app" (or a bunch of them) that lets people across all walks of life address their core concerns of livelihood, health, and education with speed and efficacy.

Infrastructure upgrade

Over 165 million people live within approximately 148,000 square kms with 230 rivers criss-crossing the landmass, concentration of urban population (40 percent) in one megacity Dhaka and nine other large cities, absence of a deep seaport in a country that's known to be the world's second largest producer of ready-made-garments and is dependent on imports to bring most of the industrial raw material. Tremendous amount of work has happened in the last decade to fix the issue of electricity generation and supply, widening of roads, completion of the most ambitious Padma bridge, expansion of port handling capacity and upgradation of inland waterways. Focus on building and maintaining infrastructure acts as the biggest factor for driving access and efficiency. Cost of goods sold comes down putting more money in the hands of the farmers and producers, reducing waste, and enhancing capability.

Modernising agriculture

This has been a recurring theme not much spoken about but abundantly experienced across the villages. Growing adoption of mechanisation is continuously improving the legacy methods to bring higher efficiency and yield. As per the World Bank, Bangladesh has one of the fastest rates of agriculture productivity growth in the world since 1995 (2.7 percent per year, second only to China). Access to agricultural management practices including fertiliser, pests and diseases control, quality seeds is improving. In fact, local financial institutions like BRAC, IPDC and others are using mobile technology and AI based solutions to make agricultural loans available to farmers. A further scaleup of this along with modernisation of Mandis (price discovery, quality assessment and logistics and storage solutions) will create sizeable surplus, bringing much awaited prosperity to rural Bangladesh.

Consumer confidence and sustained evolution

This is a subject that marketers and business people like me watch very closely. The degree of optimism that consumers feel about the overall state of the economy and their personal financial situation is very encouraging. The force of their confidence and aspiration can be experienced on a cricket field or amidst young entrepreneurs vying for global attention with their cutting-edge innovations, or on globally popular talent-on-demand platforms like Fiverr or Upwork where Bangladesh is one of the top 10 sources of talent, or in the buzzing marketplaces of Bangladeshi towns where consumers are demanding products and brands with higher order benefits and premium offerings. This sustained evolution of Bangladeshi consumer is not yet visible in consulting reports and hence is often missed.

The art of simultaneously driving a two-speed economy is truly that, an art. While the critics of capitalism or supporters of socialism would frown at this idea with concerns of growing class divide between the "Haves" and the "Have Nots", the reality is, only the Nordic countries have successfully combined features of capitalism, such as market economy and economic efficiency, with social benefits, such as state pensions and income distribution. Developmental programme in Bangladesh running at massive scale have benefited millions of people across the length and breadth of the country, helped give birth to globally known concept of micro-finance, made health-care available, assisted education, empowered women and created a labour-intensive export-oriented economy that slowly and steadily alleviated poverty and brought prosperity. The challenge of urban and rural will exist, like it does in rest of the world. However, the development in infrastructure, technology, capability, and access will democratise the benefits across socio-economic groups.

As we celebrate 50 years of independence of this dynamic and resilient country, one is reminded of the tasks ahead. Some of the key hurdles in the path of growth and social development would need to be addressed. Many of the luminaries of Bangladesh have summarised those challenges into four or five buckets; namely quality of primary and secondary education, developing vocational training to ensure high capability resources for the industry, or increased focus on healthcare—affordable and accessible healthcare for all, and rule of law and good governance, ranging from duties and taxes to safety and security for common men and women. I feel confident that with a clear strategy, great leadership, and brilliant execution, it is possible and attainable. History would be indebted to the current generation for building the foundation of a "Golden Decade" of transformation as Bangladesh upgrades to becoming a developing economy and a beacon of holistic progress globally.

Kedar Lele is the Chairman and Managing Director of Unilever Bangladesh.