13 Digital economy and AI

Chapter 13 of 60 in the Bangladesh 2036 research base. Contents of the series.

The rails are built and the freight is the decade's question

Bangladesh enters FY27, the first year of the window the chapter 15 scenarios assume, with near universal mobile network coverage, a mobile money rail that moves more than a third of GDP in transaction value, and an internet user base that crossed half the population in 2024, and none of them answers the question that decides the sector's contribution to the 2036 endpoint those scenarios price: whether the rails carry freight. The freight is ICT service exports stalled near 740.89 million USD in FY25 [WB WDI 2026], formal credit issued against digital transaction histories, and state services that run on the 1,000 plus e-services the state claims [A2I 2025]. The FY10 to FY25 record is that the state built access and payments fast, and exports and trust slowly, because those require institutions that price risk and bind the state itself. The same state that wired 161,966 kilometre of optical fibre by FY23 [BTRC 2023] also legislated the digital security framework chapter 12 documents, and the freedom of expression index that fell through that era only partially recovered. The decade ahead, the FY27 to FY36 window the chapter 15 scenarios assume, is decided by conversion, not construction: conversion of SIM penetration into use, of payment accounts into credit, of the compliance agenda of chapter 02 into an exportable trust infrastructure, and of a freelance and engineering workforce into an AI economy participant rather than its casualty.

The record: access and payments were built fast, use and exports moved slow

Access is the FY10 to FY25 construction record. Individuals using the internet rose from 3.70 percent of the population in 2010 to 12.37 percent in 2015, 30.38 percent in 2019, 44.50 percent in 2023 and 53.42 percent in 2024, all on a calendar year basis [WB WDI 2026]. Mobile subscriptions rose from 44.63 per 100 people in 2010 to 100.40 in 2019 and 111.28 in 2023 before falling to 108.08 in 2024 as the registration cleanup deactivated duplicate SIMs [WB WDI 2026]. Fixed broadband, the tier that carries heavy use, rose from 0.27 per 100 people in 2010 to 8.09 in 2024 [WB WDI 2026], the number that separates a browsing population from a bandwidth using one. The household view sits between those counts: in 2023, 97.9 percent of households had a mobile phone, 43.6 percent had internet access at home and 8.9 percent had a computer [BBS ICT HH 2023]. The pipe behind the access record doubled in two years: bandwidth capacity rose from 2,710.36 Gbps in FY21 to 5,805.05 Gbps in FY23, with usage rising from 2,465.03 to 4,865.44 Gbps [BTRC 2023], carried on a national fibre base of 161,966 kilometre [BTRC 2023].

The regulator's counts and the population's use tell different stories, and the gap is a finding. On the regulator's books, mobile subscriptions reached 186.1 million and internet subscribers 129.4 million at end FY23, with 93.8 million 4G subscribers and teledensity of 105.81 percent [BTRC 2023]; the regulator's own annual report put internet density at 72 percent in June 2022 [BTRC 2022]. The 2022 census measured 30.69 percent of the population aged 5 and above using the internet in the three months before the count and 55.90 percent having a mobile phone for their own use [BBS Census 2022, National Report Volume I, Tables 3.2.31 and 3.2.32], and the World Bank use estimate for calendar 2022 was 41.62 percent [WB WDI 2026]. A country where 129.4 million SIMs carry an internet subscription cannot have only 30.69 percent of people aged 5 and above using the internet in the census taken the same period, and the reconciliation is that the regulator counts connections while the census counts people, with multiple SIMs per user, shared handsets and dormant connections in between. Findex 2024 measures the household side: 82.39 percent of adults age 15 and above own a mobile phone, 76.30 percent used one daily, but only 61.47 percent have a SIM in their own name [WB Findex 2024, con1, con12d, con11].

Payments are the sector's world class result; chapter 07 carries the full series. Registered mobile money accounts grew from 125,506 in 2011 to 238.68 million in 2024, active accounts reached 88.89 million, and agent outlets reached 822,726 against 19,829 automated teller machines [IMF FAS 2024]. Transaction value reached 1,737,411 crore BDT in 2024, 34.7 percent of GDP, while mobile money balances held only 0.26 percent of GDP [IMF FAS 2024], the signature of a payment pipe rather than a savings intermediator. The bank channel deepened on the same schedule: internet banking transaction volume rose from 137,384 crore BDT in calendar 2021 to 763,416 crore in 2023 and 1,109,278 crore BDT in 2024, roughly eight times in three years [BB FSR 2024]. Yet account ownership in the formal system fell from 52.81 percent of adults in 2021 to 43.28 percent in 2024 [WB Findex 2024, account.t.d], so the payment boom and the formal finance stock moved in opposite directions in the latest wave.

The export sector is the result that never arrived. ICT service exports on the balance of payments, a World Bank series that follows Bangladesh's July to June fiscal year, were 527.79 million USD in FY17, fell to 405.08 million USD in FY20, reached 721.19 million USD in FY22 and 740.89 million USD in FY25, the series high, 8.79 percent of the 8,424.86 million USD of service exports the same source records [WB WDI 2026]. The government's own target of 5 billion USD of IT exports by 2021, recorded in the ICT Division annual report alongside a 2 million skilled workforce target [ICT Division 2020], compares with a balance of payments outturn of 618.50 million USD in FY21 [WB WDI 2026], a miss of roughly eightfold; the report does not state the target's measurement basis, so the miss is definition dependent but large on any basis. The EPB product series for ICT exports holds no data points, so the higher headline figures quoted in trade compilations could not be confirmed, with EPB the resolving source; the compilation figures of around one million active freelancers and about 1 billion USD of freelancing income in 2024 are likewise not established, their only machine record being a secondary snapshot whose upstream publisher is not named, and the balance of payments line above is the measured record; chapter 20 carries the freelancing question one level deeper. The goods side is smaller still: ICT goods were 0.05 percent of goods exports in 2015, the last year the series carries [WB WDI 2026], and high technology exports were 0.54 percent of manufactured exports in 2018, the last carried year [WB WDI 2026].

The state's own digital estate is real but shallow. The National Data Center has run a Tier III standard government facility since 2010, holds more than 200 racks at the primary site, carries Uptime Institute Tier 3 design certification, and backs it with a disaster recovery site at Jashore [BCC 2024]. The a2i programme reports 33,000 government websites interconnected and more than 1,000 e-services in public use [A2I 2025]. The e-procurement platform became mandatory for all public procurement under the Public Procurement Rules 2025 that took effect on 28 September 2025 [BPPA 2025], which converts a showcase into the default channel for the development programme chapter 04 tracks. BTCL, the legacy operator, runs 41,336 kilometre of underground optical fibre, up from roughly 6,000 kilometre in 2015, leased 20,236 kilometre to the mobile operators in FY24-25, and earned EBITDA of 380.45 crore BDT in FY24-25 from 264.49 crore BDT in FY23-24 [BTCL 2025].

AI readiness sits in the bottom half of every index that carries Bangladesh. The Global Innovation Index ranked the country 130 of 142 economies in 2013, 102 of 132 in 2022 and 106 of 133 in 2024 with a score of 21.4 [WIPO GII 2024]. Resident patent applications numbered 74 in 2021 against 373 by nonresidents [WB WDI 2026]. There is no verifiable GPU scale public compute platform on record, and the data centre estate that would host one is the 200 rack facility above [BCC 2024], so any figure on national AI compute capacity could not be confirmed, with the ICT Division as resolving source. Startup finance has the same evidentiary hole: the state's venture vehicle Startup Bangladesh Limited exists in the annual report record [ICT Division 2020], no series in the data lake carries venture investment or startup funding levels, and every number in that space is not established, with Bangladesh Bank and the ICT Division as resolving sources; chapter 55 carries the startup question one level deeper. The development budget shows what the state prices: the revised FY26 programme allocates 2,286.25 crore BDT to 18 projects of the ICT Division and 774.69 crore BDT to 10 projects of the Posts and Telecommunications Division, against 15,530.97 crore BDT for 50 projects of the Power Division, roughly five times the two digital divisions together [Planning Commission ADP 2026].

Mechanism: priced access, counted connections and a state that operates and controls the network

The first is the price and localisation machine that built access. The regulator cut bandwidth prices repeatedly and by 2022 quoted a consumer price of 40 to 100 BDT per gigabyte, introduced the one country one rate broadband tariff, and reported 98.2 percent of the country's area under mobile network coverage [BTRC 2022]. The March 2022 spectrum auction raised spectrum per million subscribers by about 121 percent [BTRC 2022]. The handset machine is the industrial policy that worked at assembly level: 96 percent of the FY22 handset market was assembled domestically across 15 plants, with roughly 2,000 crore BDT of domestic and foreign investment and about 11,000 workers [BTRC 2022], and the tariff structure that made imported handsets expensive is the protection the trade chapters cost elsewhere. The fibre build that carries the traffic is a state owned operator story, BTCL's 41,336 kilometre underground network with nationwide district coverage, leased to the mobile operators as transmission backbone [BTCL 2025], built on the public capital budget rather than operator balance sheets.

The second mechanism is the counting regime, and it is load bearing because budgets and politics price the headline. The regulator licenses and counts connections, the census counts people, and the 72 percent, 41.62 percent and 30.69 percent readings for the same period cannot all describe the same thing [BTRC 2022] [WB WDI 2026] [BBS Census 2022, Table 3.2.32]. The registration cleanup that cut mobile subscriptions from 111.28 to 108.08 per 100 people [WB WDI 2026] is the visible edge of the gap: a share of the national subscriber stock was never a person. The fiscal consequence runs through the development budget, where the digital sector's combined FY26 allocation of 3,060.94 crore BDT across 28 projects [Planning Commission ADP 2026] competes against programmes whose outputs are kilometre and megawatt counts rather than subscriber counts, and headline subscriber statistics are how the sector defends its claim. The chapter 12 statistics credibility agenda applies: the sector cannot distinguish a use gap from a coverage gap while the headline is a SIM count.

The third mechanism is the state's two handed relationship with the network it built, and it explains the export and trust record together. The delivery hand built the a2i service estate of 33,000 websites and 1,000 plus e-services [A2I 2025], digitised procurement [BPPA 2025], and ran the hi-tech park programme, 39 parks under construction with 5 at commercial operation and 120 companies allocated space as of FY20, with about 50 million USD of company investment recorded at that point [ICT Division 2020]. The control hand legislated the Digital Security Act 2018, successor to the ICT Act's speech provisions, and replaced it with the Cyber Security Act 2023; the interim administration after 2024 moved to replace that law again, and the status of its successor statute could not be confirmed, with the Law Ministry gazette as resolving source. The V-Dem freedom of expression index fell from 0.494 in 2013 to 0.366 in 2019, recovered to 0.383 in 2020 and 0.391 in 2021 before the 2024 transition, and stood at 0.412 in 2022, the last year the series carries [VDem 2022]. In July 2024 the network itself was shut down nationwide during the uprising chapter 12 documents; the event claims around the shutdown could not be confirmed against a primary source, with BTRC's shutdown orders and the Freedom on the Net series the resolving sources, neither in the registry. The export consequence is direct: digital trade is trust trade, buyers offshore services to jurisdictions with enforceable data protection and predictable speech regimes, and the export line the record traces moved sideways across the decade the control hand governed. The inclusion consequence runs through the same record: 71.7 percent of surveyed persons with disabilities reported facing offensive or inaccessible content, and only 4 percent of persons with disabilities use mobile internet against 27 percent of persons without disabilities [A2I 2025].

The decade ahead: five conversions decide whether the rails carry freight

The inclusion frontier is the first, and its author is BTRC with the operators. Coverage is no longer the binding constraint, 98.2 percent area coverage against 53.42 percent use [BTRC 2022] [WB WDI 2026], so the frontier is price, gender and skills. The census put internet use at 46.58 percent of men age 15 and above against 27.77 percent of women in 2022, an 18.81 percentage point gap, and mobile phone ownership for own use at 84.16 percent of men against 56.43 percent of women, a 27.73 point gap [BBS Census 2022, National Report Volume I, Tables 3.2.31 and 3.2.32]. Findex 2024 shows the same divide a year on: women own phones at 73.70 percent against 91.33 percent for men, and hold a SIM in their own name at 49.30 percent against 74.00 percent [WB Findex 2024, con1.1, con1.2, con11.1, con11.2]. The decision points are the tariff and spectrum regime, and the entry of satellite internet services, for which licence status could not be confirmed, with BTRC the resolving source. At the calendar 2016 to 2024 pace of about 4.6 percentage points of use per year [WB WDI 2026], the country passes 70 percent use before 2030, the upper path the reform scenario targets, and every point of the gender gap closed adds users the payment and tax rails of chapters 04 and 07 can reach.

The payments to credit conversion is the second, authored by Bangladesh Bank with the mobile money providers. The rail moves 34.7 percent of GDP in transaction value and holds 0.26 percent of GDP in balances [IMF FAS 2024], which is the design, since customer funds sit in bank accounts rather than on provider books. The conversion decision is whether transaction ledgers attached to digital identity become admissible underwriting data, the mechanism chapter 07 names as the answer to the SME credit decline to 5.98 percent of GDP [IMF FAS 2024], and whether the repaired banks of chapter 06 underwrite against them; chapter 37 carries the instrument detail.

The services export conversion is the third, authored by the ICT Division with the Ministry of Commerce, and it inherits chapter 02's clock. The GSP+ application and the 27 conventions create, from the outside, the compliance infrastructure, data governance, labour standards, beneficial ownership, that digital services buyers underwrite. The FY17 to FY25 compound growth rate of ICT service exports is 4.3 percent a year on chapter arithmetic, a plateau, and the export scenario the chapter 15 baseline assumes holds that line unless the trust infrastructure lands; the historical warning is the 5 billion USD by 2021 target [ICT Division 2020], proof that sector targets without institutional change deliver an eightfold miss. AI cuts both ways on this line: the same models compress entry level freelancing, the sector's proven on ramp, while they raise the value of the engineering and compliance tiers above it, and chapter 08's skills agenda is the swing variable.

The compute and data governance decision is the fourth, authored by BCC and the ICT Division with the universities of chapter 09. The estate on the books is the Tier III national facility with its Jashore disaster recovery site [BCC 2024], and no GPU capacity programme could be confirmed, with the ICT Division resolving. The innovation base it would serve ranks 106 of 133 on the Global Innovation Index with a score of 21.4 [WIPO GII 2024], and the patent record, 74 resident applications in 2021 [WB WDI 2026], measures an economy that consumes intellectual property rather than files it. Whether the state prices compute and a data protection statute as infrastructure, the way it priced fibre, decides which side of the AI divide the services sector lands on; chapter 54 carries the agenda one level deeper.

The regulatory reset is the fifth, authored by the Law Ministry and BTRC. The DSA to CSA to successor sequence is unresolved as of drafting; it could not be confirmed, with the gazette the resolving source, and the measured base it inherits is the expression index trajectory in the mechanism section, still 0.082 below its 2013 level at the last carried reading [VDem 2022].

Three risks print in measured series and the upside runs on rails the state already built

Risks. First, network control returns: the shutdown precedent of July 2024, not confirmed, with resolving sources named in the mechanism section, becomes standard crisis management, and the revealing indicator is the V-Dem expression index falling back below the 0.35 reversion line as the successor speech law lands [VDem 2022]. Second, the inclusion ceiling binds: the gender gap in phone ownership, 73.70 percent for women against 91.33 percent for men [WB Findex 2024, con1.1, con1.2], and the disability divide, 4 percent against 27 percent mobile internet use [A2I 2025], harden into a two tier digital economy, and the revealing indicator is the Findex gender and registration gaps in the next survey wave and the census internet use share against the 30.69 percent reading [BBS Census 2022, Table 3.2.32]. Third, the export plateau plus AI compression: ICT service exports stay in the 600 to 750 million USD band while entry level freelancing work is absorbed by model providers abroad, and the revealing indicator is the balance of payments ICT line, 740.89 million USD in FY25 [WB WDI 2026], breaking below 600 million USD with the unconfirmed freelancing compilation figures falling with it.

Upside. First, the formalisation dividend the other chapters wait on: the payment rail is the cheapest tax and transfer administration instrument the state has built, 69.87 percent of G2P beneficiaries already collected payments through mobile money agents in 2022 [Harvard Dataverse 2022], the remittance jump chapter 03 traces ran over it, and the revealing indicator is formal account ownership recovering above the 2021 level of 52.81 percent [WB Findex 2024, account.t.d]. Second, trust led services exports: the compliance agenda of chapter 02 doubles as the digital trade agenda, and a jurisdiction that passes EU monitoring under GSP+ has, by construction, the data and governance certifications services buyers price, and the revealing indicator is the ICT service export line sustained above 1 billion USD and its service export share recovering above the FY17 level of 13.64 percent [WB WDI 2026]. Third, AI assisted state delivery: 1,000 plus e-services and a mandatory e-procurement channel [A2I 2025] [BPPA 2025] are the installed base on which translation, triage and fraud screening pay for themselves first, and the revealing indicator is the Global Innovation Index rank, 106 of 133 in 2024 [WIPO GII 2024], breaking into the top 100 alongside a published public compute figure, still unconfirmed as noted.

What to watch: five indicators whose thresholds mark the regime

1. Individuals using the internet. Current value 53.42 percent of the population in 2024, calendar year basis [WB WDI 2026]. Threshold: the inclusion scenario this chapter assumes needs a reading above 65 percent by FY30; a reading stuck below 55 percent in the 2026 to 2028 publications confirms the stall scenario.
2. Fixed broadband subscriptions. Current value 8.09 per 100 people in 2024 [WB WDI 2026]. Threshold: sustained growth above 15 per 100 signals the fixed network and power reliability buildout of chapter 10 is converting to household bandwidth; stagnation below 10 keeps the economy mobile only and caps the export sectors that need it.
3. ICT service exports. Current value 740.89 million USD in FY25, 8.79 percent of service exports on the World Bank denominator of 8,424.86 million USD [WB WDI 2026]. Threshold: a sustained run above 1 billion USD is the evidence that the export sector exists; a fall below 600 million USD confirms the plateau and AI compression risk.
4. Mobile money active accounts. Current value 88.89 million active against 238.68 million registered in 2024, a 37.2 percent active share on chapter arithmetic [IMF FAS 2024]. Threshold: an active share above 50 percent signals the payment rail is deepening into the savings and credit behaviour the credit conversion targets; a share falling below 30 percent signals dormant account inflation and a rail that stops at cash in, cash out.
5. Freedom of expression and alternative information. Current value 0.412 in 2022, the last year the series carries [VDem 2022]. Threshold: recovery above the 2013 level of 0.494 validates the post 2024 correction and the trust base a data economy needs; a fall back below 0.35 as the successor speech statute takes effect is the reversion event that prices Bangladesh out of the trust trade the export upside depends on.

Sources used

[WB WDI 2026] World Development Indicators, ICT access series IT.NET.USER.ZS, IT.CEL.SETS.P2, IT.NET.BBND.P2 (calendar years), ICT and total service exports BX.GSR.CCIS.CD, BX.GSR.CCIS.ZS, BX.GSR.NFSV.CD (balance of payments, Bangladesh fiscal year labelled by end year, FY17 to FY25 via hdx/wb_combined.csv), ICT goods TX.VAL.ICTG.ZS.UN, patents IP.PAT.RESD, IP.PAT.NRES, high technology exports TX.VAL.TECH.MF.ZS. [BBS Census 2022] Population and Housing Census 2022, National Report Volume I, Tables 3.2.31 and 3.2.32, mobile phone for own use and internet use in the previous three months, population aged 5 and above and 15 and above by sex. [WB Findex 2024] Global Findex 2024 wave, Bangladesh, series con1, con11, con12d, account.t.d. [IMF FAS 2024] Financial Access Survey, mobile money, agent and ATM series. [BB FSR 2024] Financial Stability Report 2024, internet banking transaction volume via bdpolicy.db, series: bb_fsr_internet_banking_volume, calendar year December dated, unit billion BDT converted to crore at 100 crore per billion. [BTRC 2022] BTRC Annual Report 2021-22, OCR text, coverage, spectrum, tariff, handset and subscriber statements. [BTRC 2023] BTRC subscriber, bandwidth and fibre series through FY23 via the MoF SOE compilation. [BTCL 2025] BTCL Directors Report and audited accounts FY2024-25, OCR text. [BCC 2024] Bangladesh Computer Council, National Data Center service portfolio 2024, OCR text. [A2I 2025] a2i policy brief on bridging the digital divide for persons with disabilities, 2025, OCR text. [ICT Division 2020] ICT Division annual report 2019-20, hi-tech park, export target and Startup Bangladesh statements, OCR text. [WIPO GII 2024] Global Innovation Index 2024, Bangladesh score and rank. [Planning Commission ADP 2026] Revised Annual Development Programme FY2025-26, division allocations, unit lakh taka converted to crore. [BPPA 2025] Public Procurement Rules 2025 and e-GP mandate. [BBS ICT HH 2023] BBS household ICT access statistics, share of households with mobile phone, internet and computer access, via bdpolicy.db. [Harvard Dataverse 2022] G2P beneficiary payment collection channel shares, Bangladesh, DOI 10.7910/DVN/V4EKDG, via bdpolicy.db, series: ssn_g2p_mobile_agent_share_pct. [VDem 2022] V-Dem dataset, freedom of expression and alternative sources of information index, v2x_freexp_altinf, annual values through 2022.

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Verified line by line against primary sources: 131 claims checked, 19 corrected.

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