To export better skills, Bangladesh must import talent

Like many who studied at missionary institutions in Dhaka before 2000, such as St. Joseph High School and Notre Dame College, I have watched my peers go on to top Western universities and pursue top jobs globally.

The usual explanation is academics. However, that is only half the story. What set those students apart was what the missionaries brought from outside.

They gave us exposure to another culture, a different way of thinking and speaking, and a working knowledge of how the wider world operates.

Our foreign teachers and administrators made us comfortable in rooms we had never entered.

They did it for less than Tk 2,000 a year. Today, schools charging more than Tk 12 lakh a year rarely match it.

The difference was never money. It was exposure to people who brought the world with them.

That lesson matters more now than ever. Bangladesh is a manpower-exporting nation, but trade does not run in one direction. To export higher-value skills, we must also import the expertise that builds them.

The export side is already a marginal success. Workers sent home about US$30.3 billion in FY2024-25.

Yet too much of that money is still earned through physical labour rather than technical skill, management expertise or intellectual property.

The question is no longer how many Bangladeshis we can send abroad. It is how much each of them can earn.

The government has already made the case. At the 81st UN General Assembly on 24 September, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, himself a St. Joseph High School product, spoke of turning our working-age population into “skilled human resources,” building a “manufacturing hub,” and securing “technology transfer, skills development” and “capacity building.” But technology does not travel in shipping containers alone.

The knowledge needed to run, repair and improve it lives in people: engineers, physicians, professors, designers and managers.

A country that welcomes foreign capital but resists foreign expertise buys machines without mastering their use. If technology transfer is national policy, talent transfer must be too.

Our rules,however, point the other way. BIDA generally limits foreign staff to ratios of 10:1 for new industrial projects, 20:1 once operating, and 5:1 for commercial offices and educational institutions.

It also expects employers to show that no local candidate is available. Protecting local jobs is legitimate. In high-skill sectors, however, this test is wrong.

The question should not be “Could a Bangladeshi fill this seat today?” It should be “Will this person multiply the Bangladeshis who can fill such seats tomorrow?”

We already know this works. The garment industry did not become world-class on cheap labour alone.

Foreign merchandisers, technicians, compliance specialists and managers taught factories what global buyers expect, and they brought buyer networks with them.

The lesson is not that foreigners should run our factories. It is that imported expertise shortens learning curves. That lesson now needs to be applied well beyond apparel.

Healthcare. WHO counts only 13.9 doctors, nurses and midwives per 10,000 Bangladeshis.

The deeper gap is in specialisation: oncology, transplants, complex cardiac care, genetics and critical care.

BMDC oversight of foreign practitioners must stay, because patient safety is non-negotiable. But oversight can be fast and predictable.

Every month a specialist waits for clearance, another family boards a flight abroad for treatment.

Accredited hospitals should be able to recruit foreign specialists for fixed terms, with local teams attached and results measured.

Universities. UGC qualification templates protect standards, but they also screen out the people universities most need.

A Bangladeshi with fifteen years at a global chip firm or a leading laboratory may not fit a local GPA-and-publication ladder.

That should not disqualify the individual. Universities need clear authority to appoint professors of practice, research chairs and visiting faculty on the basis of demonstrated achievement.

Our neighbours already do this:
” India’s GIAN programme has approved more than 2,100 courses taught by international faculty.
” Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission now funds foreign faculty visits of two to sixteen weeks.
” Vietnam has set targets through 2035 for bringing foreign and diaspora experts into higher education.
Bangladesh has no equivalent.
Semiconductors. The National Semiconductor Taskforce, approved in January 2025 with non-resident Bangladeshi industry leaders on board, reflects exactly the right instinct. Chip design cannot be learned from textbooks.

Engineers who have been through real design flows, verification and tape-outs should be recruited on multi-year appointments with one mandate: build teams, supervise real projects, and leave behind institutions that outlast them.

Energy. Rooppur has shown that complex infrastructure requires outside expertise.

The next step is breadth. Bangladesh needs exposure to the wider nuclear ecosystem, including the IAEA and experienced operators such as South Korea, France and Japan, so that it can one day evaluate, regulate and choose technologies on its own terms.

Freelancing. BIDA cites more than 650,000 registered freelancers, and the sector earns roughly US$500 million a year.

Much of that work is commoditised. Moving up requires something code alone cannot supply: understanding the Italian user, the Japanese gamer and the American client. Cultural fluency is an economic skill.

The missionary schools understood this decades ago.
So is professional English.

The goal is not to mimic an accent. It is to be understood, to negotiate and to handle a meeting with confidence, and those abilities come from exposure.

Foreign product managers, designers, marketers and communication coaches working inside our institutes would give thousands of young people that exposure before they ever leave home. Preparation for migration should not begin at the airport.

None of this requires an open door. It requires a selective one, and the government has already built the right model at home.

The Family Card, launched in March, is a digital social safety net that brings poor and low-income families under a single unified database for direct financial and food assistance.

It is meant to consolidate fragmented safety nets into one technology-driven system.

It runs on what the Social Welfare Minister calls a dynamic social registry, updated continuously as beneficiaries’ circumstances change.

Its guiding principle is simple: the family, not the individual, is the primary unit of development.

Foreign talent deserves the same thinking. Today a specialist must clear BIDA, security vetting and immigration, and often BMDC or UGC as well. Each step is separate, sequential and slow.

A Global Talent Card would replace that maze with one digital credential covering visa, work permit, residence and professional clearance, issued in days rather than months.

Like its domestic counterpart, it should treat the family as the unit.

That means work rights for spouses and school places for children, because top professionals decide where to live as families.

And it should run on a live registry that tracks each cardholder’s knowledge-transfer commitments, so that renewal depends on results.

Around that card, a Bangladesh Global Talent and Knowledge Transfer Programme should: “Open a Returning Diaspora Track within the card for Bangladeshis with strong international careers.

“Free universities and accredited hospitals to hire visiting professors, professors of practice and foreign specialists under expedited procedures with proper safeguards.

“Attach a knowledge-transfer plan to every card, covering named local successors, training hours, curricula and procedures.

“Fund short visiting-expert programmes in AI, chip design, medicine, energy, export marketing and English communication.

The programme should be judged by one standard. The measure is not how many foreigners enter.

It is how many Bangladeshis are trained, how far wages rise, and how much expertise stays in the country.

The strongest objection is that a crowded labour market must protect jobs. That concern deserves respect.

But more often we notice the restrictions are actually there to protect interests of a small group of people to benefit financially.

The response is to design the system well, not to exclude expertise. A foreigner who holds a post indefinitely adds little.

One who builds a department, trains fifty people and brings in buyers creates jobs that did not exist before. Policy should know the difference.

For decades, Bangladesh built the machinery to send people out. It is time to build the machinery to bring knowledge in.

There is a bitter irony here. The kind of foreign teachers who shaped my generation now meet a closed door.

A missionary seeking to serve in Bangladesh needs a letter of concurrence from the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

The ministry approves a visa only after a positive report from the Home Ministry’s intelligence agencies.

Once admitted, missionary visa holders are barred from any employment, paid or unpaid.

Some long-serving missionaries have had their visa extensions withheld, and one said he was leaving after nine years against his wishes.

In other words, the people who once gave Dhaka’s classrooms the world for Tk 2,000 a year would today struggle to stay long enough to teach. We have already closed the door on those who proved the point.

We should not make the same mistake with the academics, doctors and engineers Bangladesh needs next.

(Javed Hosein is a member of the Board of Trustees of Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from Cornell University.

Prior to moving back to Bangladesh, he worked as a senior manager at Accenture’s Management Consulting unit in New York, NY).