Icons in ICT to be honoured today

The Daily Star and Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services will honour four individuals and four organisations in recognition of their contribution to the country's ICT industry, now seen as the next big export sector after garment.

Finance Minister AMA Muhith will hand out the awards as the chief guest at the Daily Star ICT Awards ceremony, to be held at the Le Meridien hotel in Dhaka today.

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The programme will be organised in association with BRAC Bank and TiE Dhaka. Le Méridien Dhaka is the hospitality partner for the event, organisers said in a statement yesterday.

A total of 156 entries were made, from which the jury panel shortlisted 44 nominees. Finally, eight organisations and individuals were selected for the awards in six different categories.

Today, the ICT sector in Bangladesh is a $1 billion industry, with more than 1,500 firms and 40 offshore development centres.

It all started in 2008, when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina laid out the vision of building a digital Bangladesh by 2021.

Since then, lots of great things have happened in the ICT sector. For instance, it has attracted the likes of South Korean electronics giant Samsung, which set up a software research and development centre in Dhaka in 2010, and global outsourcing firm Accenture, which has a large business process outsourcing outfit.

Gartner, an American IT and research firm, counts Bangladesh among the top 30 outsourcing destinations in the world, and the country came in at No. 26 of Chicago-based global management consultancy firm AT Kearney's index of top 50 offshoring destinations.

It has gone on to become a huge hub for freelance work via online marketplaces such as Upwork, punching with heavyweights like India and the US and coming higher in the rankings than China, Canada and the UK.

The reason for the wave of optimism is the country's large youth population, who happens to be very receptive to the latest technology.

To harness it, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and the finance ministry have taken up projects to train about 59,000 IT professionals over the next 3-4 years.

The government, too, is very committed to making sure that the sector reaches its full potential: it has granted tax exemption until 2024, withdrawn value-added tax from e-commerce and given 300 acres of land in Kaliakoir to develop an industrial park.

The government has now set its sights to hit $1 billion in exports of IT and IT-enabled services by 2018 and it has already registered $450 million, according to the ICT division.