Bangladesh-Estonia IT Connect and Business Exchange Agreement will be signed soon: Palak
Inspired by plenty of success and capabilities of Estonia; Bangladesh is keen to interest to take the country's experience in engineering, technology, digital public infrastructure, architecture and software solutions. For that purpose, Bangladesh State Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak held a bilateral meeting with Mrs. Kristi Karelsohn, Head of the Asia-Pacific Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of this Northern European country.
In the meeting, the Estonian delegation expressed interest in importing IT products from Bangladesh and exporting their manufactured smart technology products to Bangladesh. Other members of this delegation are Estonian Ambassador to India Marji Loup, Honorary Consul of Estonia in Bangladesh Syed Farhad Ahmed and DCM of Estonian Embassy in New Delhi Margus Solson.
After the meeting held at the Secretariat, the state minister said that the success of Digital Bangladesh in the last 15 years has been highlighted in the meeting. At the same time, the e-governance pilot project started by the ICT department in cooperation with the European Union was updated on the experience of Estonia being used.
Palak also said that according to the decision of the meeting, a business portal called Bangladesh-Estonia IT Connect will be inaugurated soon. There will also be a trade regulation agreement between the two countries.
Palak said, Estonia has already gained global recognition for operating one of the world's digital government systems, providing citizen services through cutting-edge technology and rich data-driven services. Any citizen of Estonia does not have to provide any information a second time for providing and receiving citizen services, information once provided for any service is stored and used later in automated processes.
He also said, inspired by Estonia's success and capabilities, Bangladesh can use some of their strategies, technologies, digital public infrastructure, architecture and software solutions to build a prosperous smart Bangladesh in the future. One goal of which is to create smart government solutions by ensuring citizen-centric services for people through finger tips in a corruption-free manner, saving time, money and resources.
In the meeting, Estonia's ambassador from Delhi, Kristi Carlson, has been assured that Bangladesh is rich in terms of technology and skills, but there is little opportunity to scale it up. Also, it was discussed that Estonian technology and startups can expand their business in Bangladesh and at the same time our startups and companies can also expand their business in collaboration with them.
"Taking these things into consideration, we want to strengthen our relationship with Estonia and institutionalize it," added Zunaid Ahmed Palak. He said that Bangladesh and Estonia will work together on e-governance, smart government service delivery, research, innovation, capacity building, human resource development and startup exchange and cyber security.
