Govt working to create ecosystem to make business much easier: Bida chairman Ashik Chowdhury

The interim government is working to make business operations much easier by creating an ecosystem, said Ashik Chowdhury, executive chairman of the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (Bida).

"I see this year is primarily to reform and fix the investment climate and fix the many problems that a startup or an ecosystem player has in starting a business and then potentially raising funding from the global markets," he said at the opening session of the four-day long investment summit kicked off today.

"Once someone lands in Bangladesh physically and interacts with the community, interacts with the startups, interacts with our youth, the perception they had from desktop research dramatically changes," he said at the session titled Bangladesh Startup Connect held at a city hotel.

"What we need to probably continue to focus on as an investment promotion agency for the government is how do we create that bridge between the assets we have in the country and the potential liquidity that is available globally," he said.

"We are going through a very transformational time as you all know that the country has gone through a change and we do have this once in a lifetime opportunity to potentially change a lot of things that were just given for our ecosystem.

"Let's take examples – very trivial examples like trade licence, which apparently is a very big challenge for young businesses to start doing business in Bangladesh. The questions that we really need to ask is not necessarily how we streamline the trade licence process, but start from do we even need a trade license? And if we do need a trade licence, is it like a birth certificate that we give to a company only once in their lifetime and not have them go back to the city corporation every year to renew the trade licence? I am giving you a very, very trivial example, but that is how the baseline currently is. That is how low and deep we need to go to ensure that we create an ecosystem that is much easier for businesses to operate," he said.