Bangladesh | How the density dividend scales startups fast

Emerging Markets Startups

You haven't seen city density till you've been to Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka. It's one of the densest cities in the world in a country of 165M people. This density presents challenges like terrible traffic, sprawling slums and incomplete infrastructure. Bangladeshi startups have taken advantage of the density to innovate for those unique challenges while leveraging the density’s centralization of demand and supply to scale startups fast. Our guest, Minhaz Anwar, who built Bangladeshi’s startup ecosystem up since 2008, calls this the “density dividend.” This momentum in tech startups has also intersected with another area of innovation Bangladesh is famous for: poverty alleviation. Not only are we seeing the tech sector directly tackling poverty with mobile payment systems like Bkash banking the unbanked, but the sector itself has created 1.5M jobs in the last 5-7 years. Compare this to Bangladeshi’s garment industry which has created 3.5M jobs in the last 40 years.

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