‘We were happy counting proposals, but never converted it to actual investment’: Nahian Rahman Rochi

The UNCTAD World Investment Report 2026 puts FDI into Bangladesh at about $1.77 billion in 2025, up some 40% from the previous year but mostly reinvested earnings. India drew roughly $40 billion and Vietnam, $20 billion. Even Uganda took $3.36 billion and Ghana around $2 billion, both far smaller economies than ours. Why does Bangladesh trail even Uganda and Ghana in attracting foreign investment?

Historically we have always under-performed on foreign investment. The $1.77 billion figure and the 40% growth are true, but for the past 10 to 12 years we have been stuck between $1 billion and $1.5 billion dollars, while smaller countries have grown. If you take our share of global GDP, we ought to be drawing $10 to $12 billion a year; instead we get roughly one-tenth of that. It is chronically low. 

There are many reasons: policy instability, the time it takes to start a business, fragmentation where decisions taken at policy level are never executed at ground level, energy and utility constraints. 

Address those four or five problems and we can climb out. To sit in the same bracket as the countries you named is, frankly, painful for all of us.

Are we caught in a low-investment trap? Our peak was $2.83 billion, back in 2015.

There is certainly a way out. I would not call it a trap, but what was missing was a consistent approach. For years we were happy just counting investment proposals — as if someone flying in to look around once already counted as investment. But for an investor, investment is a journey. Think of taking a loan: you study every bank's interest rate and facilities, you shortlist two, you negotiate, and only then do you decide. 

An investor behaves exactly the same way — comparing four or five countries on facilities, incentives and cost of operation, shortlisting, then assessing where the long-term return is highest. Our problem was that we took the first flush of interest as the outcome and never nurtured the investor through that journey to conversion.

Many investors have come and gone. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited in 2014, some 200 businessmen came with him, looked around, and left without investing, and there have been summits and roadshows since.

So how do you actually convert interest into investment now?

When I came into this role at the end of 2024, I asked for a shortlist of the top 10 companies from all those outreach events and roadshows. You may be surprised; there was no such list and no follow-up. Investors came, did one round and left, and we never went back to solve their queries and convert them. 

From the 2025 summit we took a different approach: keep records, follow up consistently, and once an investor is genuinely convinced, add them to a pipeline. Through those visits and the summit we built a pipeline of $1.5 billion — about 20 investors with a high probability of investing within 12 to 18 months. 

In the 18 months since, we have converted $400 million of that, and after the prime minister's China visit we added roughly another $500 million, counting the Chinese economic zone. It is a boring, repetitive process, but that consistency is how you escape the small numbers.

The law hands BIDA an enormous mandate. But with red tape, a slow legal system and other bottlenecks, what can BIDA do alone?

Any large investment case, anywhere in the world, has to be a whole-of-government effort — a connected, consolidated ecosystem. No single agency can deliver it. The law asks BIDA to facilitate everything, but honestly, that ecosystem was never built. 

Think of a bank: the customer deals with one relationship manager, who gathers every clearance from the back office and brings it back — the customer is not sent from desk to desk. 

BIDA was meant to be that front-office manager, but the connection to the back office was never made.

The one-stop service was supposed to fix that. Why did it never really function?

It brought some benefits — digitalisation, moving manual processes online. But it fell massively short, for two reasons. First, we said we were moving everything online, yet we never closed the manual channel, and no digital system works if you run both in parallel — people simply go offline. 

Second, every agency has its own one-stop, so ours is not truly one stop; it is many stops that are not connected at the back end. The fix is in the new Invest Bangladesh Act, which mandates a single landing platform to which every system must connect; we are building it under the name BanglaBiz. 

A government task force has set a target of starting a business within 14 days, and that is only possible once the single platform genuinely works.

If a dispute arises, an investor must turn to a legal system that is notoriously slow and under-resourced. How do you address that?

You have raised a genuinely under-discussed point. We focus heavily, and rightly, on facilitation and infrastructure, but legal consistency is critical — an investor wants certainty over their capital, and without the backing of the courts they simply will not come. 

The good news is a recent commercial ordinance requiring separate commercial courts at district level. My request is that the 90-day timeline set for clearing commercial cases is actually implemented at field level, which will need budget, manpower and training for the judiciary. 

Too often a decision is taken at policy level and never executed on the ground, so I would ask the media to keep raising it.

The prime minister's China visit produced a decision to open a BIDA office there. How far has that progressed?

It has progressed well. We have completed the tender and received interest from several parties, both local and international, which we are now evaluating. Ultimately we want to hire Chinese nationals with the investment connections, experience and knowledge to help us — they are best suited. 

I expect that once our internal evaluation is done we can finalise it, hopefully reaching a position to launch within about a month.

Investors are being invited, yet even existing factories are struggling through an energy crisis. How will new investment come?

That is an absolutely fair point, and there is no denying the crisis is a big problem for all of us. It is structural. We need about 4,000 million cubic feet of gas a day; even before this crisis we could supply around 3,000, so we began with a 33% shortage that has persisted for years, and it worsened when one of the FSRUs that gives us about another 1,000 developed a fault. 

There is no short cut: a land-based LNG terminal takes four to five years, an alternative FSRU at least 18 months, and a new well with transmission three to four years. For years we were so busy firefighting that we made no long-term strategic investment, and that is how we reached this point. 

So our first priority now is current investors, many of whom hold land and are ready to produce; their gas supply comes first. To new investors we are honest: not immediately, but after 18 to 24 months there is a pathway. 

We have secured cabinet approval for a third FSRU, expected in early 2028, floated a PPP tender for a land-based LNG terminal, and moved to bring in ISO tanks from Petronas of Malaysia. That confidence has to be given repeatedly, and delivered.

A law merges BIDA, BEZA and the PPP Authority into a single Invest Bangladesh Authority. Will that simplify things, or just centralise them?

I believe it will make things better. Today an investor in Bangladesh has to deal with five or six agencies. They come to BIDA for a sense of policy, but BIDA holds no land; an export-oriented firm must go to BEPZA, a PPP project to the PPP Authority. 

The whole act grew out of investors, associations and economists telling us they were confused, as though investing in one country meant dealing with several. The answer is a single front door, with zone management, policy and PPP each doing their own work but coordinated so the investor faces one agency. 

In the new act those functions are kept distinct, but the three sit within one authority. It cannot be only a change of name.

So what is the magic that lets Singapore and others pull in such investment?

There is no magic. It comes down to consistency. In those countries, an investor knows exactly what they will get today, tomorrow and the day after — policy stability. 

There is accountability: If a service provider commits to a timeline and misses it, they must answer to the investor. And there is a clear commitment on energy and infrastructure from day one. 

On the macro factors — population, age profile, cost — Bangladesh is very competitive; Singapore has barely five million people. Their edge is a boring consistency that we, frankly, tend to hate, and that is the process we now have to lift and shift. 

In the short term the priority is simply to break out of this $1.7 to $1.8 billion stagnancy; follow the pipeline approach consistently over the medium to long term, and there is a clear pathway for Bangladesh.