Dev-oriented career to ensure growth momentum

A young professional with international exposure in the field of development says country's talented youths' ideology must be ingrained of a career ethos that accelerates the growth momentum.

" We have a privileged advantage of demographic dividend of a large youthful work force and young generation should be motivated to take up career which directly promotes country development," Abu Rashed, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Expert in Prime Minister's Office (PMO) told The FE in an interview recently.

Referring to the examples of the developed countries where the brightest students prefer for a development or advisory related professions, he said, many of Bangladesh's capable students still dream of jobs which have relatively less impact on country development.

A business graduate from IBA, JU, he said, "From most of the business graduates who are taught for advanced economic and financial assessment, high quality research methodology, policy development etc., many end up with professions that do not require such advanced skill which eventually has significant opportunity cost to the country."  

Mr. Rashed who spent his entire childhood in Dhaka and witnessed the gradual change of social and economic perspective of the country over the years, said 80s and 90s was a vibrant time for all the development experts to realise the role of the economy and have the obvious understanding that future momentum would be private sector driven.

Since then, he was always fascinated to keep taking initiatives with private sector focus, which eventually helped him establish a local based cooperative while he was only 13 for payment based household waste collection in Kalyanpur, which possibly pioneered the private sector-based waste collection system in the country.

Prior to join the PMO, he worked at senior level positions for various development organisations and multinational agencies.

 His entire career is focused on private sector development especially for the multilateral agencies.

 Mr. Rashed mentioned that support from multilaterals for developing the private sector of the country was immense. He particularly referredIPFF and PSDSP of the World Bank and SAIF of IFC where he was actively involved for private sector driven infrastructure development of the country.

 Mr. Rashed is one of the global PPP experts of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and was the project editor for the UNECE PPP health policy. He also provided extensive support to ADB (Manila) for promoting higher education through PPP.

Regarding PPP, he said that globally PPP is considered as a vital tool for developing country infrastructure. He also appreciated that the current government has provided extensive support in promoting PPP in the country. Earlier Mr. Rashed worked at senior level positions for IIFC, Nestle, PHG, Singapore etc.

He also acted as guest lecturer and international speaker in CSC under Dhaka University, Berkeley University of California, Institute of Public Administration of Saudi Arabia, UK, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Srilanka, India and many more countries. He was also involved in preparing many national policies for Bangladesh and provided policy level advices to Sri Lanka (State Bank on fiscal risk management) and Saudi Arabia (IPA on PPP development fund).