Bangladesh’s Digital, AI and STEM Landscape ~
A Response and Country Snapshot

by Abdullah Ishak KHAN · June 2026

Introductory Note by The Light Millennium Global
Following our inspiring connection at the Horizon Search Institute’s Inaugural Session in New York City on June 9, 2026, The Light Millennium Global (LMGlobal.Org) is honored to share the below South Asian digital, AI, and STEM Snapshots, kindly contributed by Mr. Abdullah Ishak Khan, STI Global Fellow.
As an organization advocating for ethical technology and digital literacy through our “Compulsory Peace and ICTs Education” campaign since 2024, we deeply appreciate Mr. Khan’s thoughtful follow-up responses to the core questions we raised regarding regional positioning, K-12 integration, the inter-generational divide, and women’s advancement in STEM and Space fields.
We find his data-driven reflections to be highly educational and are pleased to present these notes to foster constructive international dialogue.

Bangladesh’s Digital, AI and STEM Landscape
A Response and Country Snapshot

A brief framing note: Bangladesh underwent a significant political transition in 2024, and several digital programmes have since been renamed or restructured. I reference institutions by their current names and flag continuity where relevant.

1. Global and Regional Positioning in AI and ICT

Bangladesh’s position is best summarised as strong and rising in digital government, with a clear and openly acknowledged AI-readiness gap still to close — a profile that mirrors the very “implementation gap” you described.
Digital government — leading the least-developed economies
In the UN E-Government Development Index (EGDI) 2024, Bangladesh ranked 100th of 193 (score 0.6570), up from 119th in 2020, and posted the highest EGDI of any Least Developed Country. Its score sits above both the global (0.638) and South Asian (0.586) averages, close behind its immediate neighbours.

Source: UN DESA, E-Government Survey 2024; UN e-Government Knowledge Base.

Economic convergence — a decade of catching up

This digital progress rests on a broader growth story. On World Bank figures (GDP per capita, current US$, 2024), Bangladesh now stands essentially level with India and well ahead of Pakistan and Nepal — a striking convergence, given that India’s per-capita income was roughly 40% higher only a decade ago.

AI readiness — the gap, stated plainly

On AI specifically, Bangladesh ranks lower on the enablers: the IMF AI Preparedness Index 2024 placed it at 113th (0.38), behind Sri Lanka, India, China and Singapore, and the Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index places it around 75th globally. The constraints are openly acknowledged — advanced talent, compute (a recent UNESCO–UNDP–EU assessment flagged GPU scarcity), R&D depth and data infrastructure.

Where Bangladesh is moving notably fast, however, is governance. Its National AI Policy 2026–2030 — released for public consultation in early 2026 and now advancing toward adoption — is strikingly forward-looking for a country at this income level. It sets out a risk-based regulatory framework with explicit prohibitions on mass surveillance and social scoring, mandatory algorithmic impact assessments for high-risk systems, a National AI Compute Strategy (including shared government GPU capacity and support for Bangladesh-specific language models), and a commitment to ratify the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI. It builds on the 2020 National AI Strategy and proposes a National AI Centre of Excellence and a multi-stakeholder Advisory Council. In short: Bangladesh is deliberately attempting to build governance infrastructure before deployment outpaces oversight — the responsible-development instinct your organisation advocates. All of this sits atop a large connectivity base of roughly 134 million internet and 188 million mobile subscribers (BTRC, mid-2025), with near-universal 4G coverage.

Sources: IMF AI Preparedness Index (2024); Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index; ICT Division — National AI Policy 2026–2030 (aipolicy.gov.bd); UNESCO–UNDP–EU AI Readiness Assessment (2025); BTRC (2025).

2. Early Educational Integration — Peace, ICT and AI in K-12

Bangladesh has a genuine, long-standing commitment to ICT in schooling, and is now beginning to layer frontier-technology skills on top of it.

• ICT is a compulsory subject from Class VI through higher-secondary, introduced under the National Education Policy 2010 and present in the 2026 national curriculum.

• Through the Digital Lab Establishment Project in Educational Institutions (the renamed successor to the earlier “Sheikh Russel Digital Lab” programme, with branding under review since 2024), the ICT Division has established 9,001 school computer labs nationwide — 4,001 in the first phase and 5,000 in the second — extending ICT access to secondary, higher-secondary, madrasah and technical institutions across all 64 districts.

• Most notably, a “Frontier Technology” teacher-training programme launched in late 2025 (with BKIICT / Bangladesh Computer Council) is training officials and educators in artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, drones, 3D printing, nanotechnology and cybersecurity — an early but deliberate move to bring emerging-technology fluency into the school system.

On your (The Light Millennium Global) specific interest in peace education: I want to be precise rather than over-claim. Bangladesh’s curriculum embeds ICT and includes moral and civic education and “Bangladesh and Global Studies,” but it does not yet have a distinct national peace-education strand of the kind The Light Millennium champions. That, to me, is precisely where the opportunity lies: the country has the infrastructure (9,000+ labs) and the political appetite for digital skilling, which makes it fertile ground for integrating peace-and-AI modules — potentially an area for collaboration rather than a box already ticked.

Sources: NCTB (2026 curriculum); ICT Division / DoICT (srdl.gov.bd); BSS (Nov 2025).

3. Digital Literacy and the Inter-Generational Divide

Access has widened dramatically in a short time, even as a real generational and affordability divide persists — both are true.

The most distinctive part of this story is financial inclusion through mobile. Mobile financial services (bKash, Nagad and others) have drawn tens of millions of previously unbanked people — rural farmers selling into wider markets, and the families of the millions of Bangladeshis working abroad — into formal digital transactions, reshaping the rural and SME economy.

The generational gap remains visible: adoption is youth-led, while older, rural and lower-income users lag, and a meaningful share still rely on basic handsets or remain offline. Affordability — not only availability — is the binding constraint; subscriptions actually dipped through parts of 2024–25 amid rising costs and high telecom taxation before recovering. Digital skills, as distinct from connectivity, are repeatedly identified as the top barrier, especially for women and older users. National delivery vehicles such as a2i and the Union Digital Centre network are the principal instruments working to close that gap.Sources: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (2025); Bangladesh Bank (2024); BTRC; DataReportal, Digital 2024/2025: Bangladesh.

4. Women and Girls in STEM, ICT, AI — and Space

This is an area where Bangladesh’s record is, in important respects, a regional success story — with a clear next frontier in technical fields.

A regional leader in gender parity

• In the WEF Global Gender Gap Index 2025, Bangladesh ranks 24th globally and 1st in South Asia for the ninth consecutive year (parity score 77.5%) — the only South Asian nation in the global top 50, ahead of India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan.

• It ranks 3rd in the world on political empowerment, and holds roughly 94% parity in educational attainment, with gender parity (and at times a female edge) in primary and secondary enrolment.

• Female labour-force participation has climbed from about 16% (1996) to the low-40s% today, and women have been the backbone of the export economy that drove the country’s growth.

Expanding the STEM pipeline — including new frontiers

Bangladesh has 100+ universities, broadly co-educational and digitally enabled, and women are well represented in medical and biological sciences. The institutional base for advanced STEM is also broadening in exactly the directions you asked about:

• the Aviation and Aerospace University, Bangladesh (AAUB), established 2019 as the country’s first public aerospace university, now runs student satellite teams and CubeSat / nano-satellite, drone and light-aircraft R&D, with international partnerships including Italy’s Thales Alenia Space and Sapienza University of Rome — a real, if early, foothold in space education; and

• the Bangladesh Maritime University (established 2013; renamed in 2025), the country’s first maritime university and among the first in South Asia, building STEM capacity in oceanography, marine science and naval architecture for the blue economy.

Alongside these, women’s participation in the digital freelancing and IT-services economy is growing, giving educated women new routes into globally traded technical work.

The honest frontier

The candid gap is in technical tertiary fields and the labour market. UNESCO data place women’s share of STEM — particularly engineering and ICT — among the lower bands in South Asia, and women who earn STEM degrees still face disproportionate barriers in converting them into careers. Underpinning this is a digital-access gap: the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2024 found Bangladesh had Asia’s widest mobile-internet gender gap, with mobile-internet use around 40% for men versus 24% for women. This is precisely the actionable space — affordability, digital skills and safe access — where targeted policy and partnerships can move the needle fastest.

Sources: WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2024 & 2025; UNESCO Institute for Statistics; GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2024/2025; UN Bangladesh Gender Equality Brief 2024.

– by Abdullah Ishak KHAN
HSI Global Fellow


Notes on Sources
All figures are drawn from the institutions named within each section and were current as of June 2026. Index rankings (EGDI, IMF AIPI, WEF GGGI) are point-in-time and update on their own survey cycles; per-capita and connectivity figures are sensitive to exchange-rate and reporting revisions. A consolidated reference list can be appended on request.