CA urges South Asian academics to align education with youth aspirations

Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus today called upon the academics to align the education system with the youths' expectations and aspirations and stressed on revival of the SAARC to enhance regional academic cooperation.

"Today, I feel very excited that academics at the highest level could get together in Dhaka. It's important that this is Dhaka. I hope you will have a chance to kind of review of the things that have happened in Dhaka in the past few months," he said while addressing the inaugural ceremony of the three-day "South Asian Regional Conference on State of Higher Education and Future Pathway (SARCHE 2026)" at a city hotel.

A total of 30 international representatives, including delegates from the United Kingdom, the Maldives, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well as representatives from the World Bank are participating in the event.

The conference is being organised under the Bangladesh government and World Bank funded Higher Education Acceleration and Transformation (HEAT) Project of the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Bangladesh.

Yunus said review of those events will clarify what university education and education as a whole are really about, adding, this should be the core subject of discussion at the gathering.

Highlighting the role of students in the 2024 uprising, he said, "Who are these young people that we are dealing with? They have their own mind. They stood up and raised their voices and brought down the ugliest fascist regime you could ever think of given their lives".

"It would be a missed opportunity if you don't spend some time on understanding what they did a few months back in this very city. What was their expectation? What was their aspiration? Why did they stand up in front of guns and give their lives knowingly it will happen," the chief adviser said.

To reflect the students' motivation behind joining the uprising, he referred to school student Shaheed Shahriar Khan Anas's letter, which he wrote to his mother before embracing the martyrdom, stating that it was his duty to take to the street with his friends, who were subjected to state-sponsored crackdown.

Noting that the event was not a sudden outburst, Yunus said it happened in Sri Lanka and in Nepal too, but it happened in a bigger way in Dhaka.

He thanked the World Bank for organising the conference, saying, "This was our responsibility to organise, but we failed. The World Bank has to step into make it happen".

Organizing such gatherings was part of the responsibility under the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Yunus said, adding, but the SAARC as a word has been forgotten and "that's a shame on us".

"This was supposed to be the idea of SAARC that we get together and make exchanges and learn from each other," he said, noting his efforts since he has taken the responsibility as the chief adviser to revive the SAARC.

"I am repeatedly reminding that we must get back to SAARC. That's where our family belongs to. And I will not give up repeating that appeal to the governments of the region," Yunus said.

Speaking about the forthcoming national elections and the referendum on 12 February, he said the uprising tore everything apart and that the young people created their own July Charter to undo what the country was stuck with.

He said there would be a referendum to decide what the future constitution of Bangladesh should be, because they believed the root of the problems lay in the constitution.

He mentioned that these issues were not taught in classrooms and questioned where universities stood in this reality.

Noting that the young people have now formed their own political party, Yunus said, "I'm sure some of them will get elected."

He called on educators to reflect on what education and university education should be in this very different world, warning that old ways of doing things are self-destructing and that change must happen quickly, just as the youth acted quickly during the uprising.