For decades, Bangladesh has asked itself: What do we need from the world to develop ourselves?
Since our independence, we have needed so much support; capital, energy, technology, markets, expertise, and development aid.
As Bangladesh eventually prepares to graduate from least developed country (LDC) status, we also become ever more exposed to increasingly unstable and unpredictable international systems of power and wealth.
It is time we asked ourselves a far more important question: What does the world actually need from Bangladesh?
No country in the 21st century is self-sufficient. A single cellphone has a supply chain with over two thousand steps across 60 countries. Singapore entirely depends on being an intermediary while South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan each import almost everything they need to survive, from food to raw materials.
Bangladesh will continue to depend on foreign markets, investment, and technology -- there is no realistic world where it doesn’t.
There is a difference, however.
Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s leading-edge semiconductors, capacity that would take enormous time, capital, and expertise to reproduce.
Even though clothes comprise over 80% of our exports, Bangladesh only produces 6.9% of the global clothing market, a market which is relatively simple to be undercut.
That is the difference between dependence and interdependence.
Recent emergencies have made this painfully clear. Aid, resources, and energy are prioritized not simply to the rich, but to countries indispensable for the global economy.
When wars, energy and trade disruptions, and climatic events hit with ever-increasing frequency; when governments and corporations must choose which relationships to protect and which supply chains to let go off, how many will choose Bangladesh over Egypt, or Morrocco, or even Vietnam?
Goodwill matters, of course, but usefulness is the best insurance. If foreign firms, workers, and governments bear real cost when Bangladesh is disrupted, they have a vested interest in our stability and success because we will have worked to align our interests.
The stronger Bangladesh becomes, the more value we create, the more interests abroad become aligned with our stability and prosperity.
Bangladesh has already shown that we can build systems at scale. In FY2025-26, ready-made garments earned $38.70 billion. We have shown that we can work with an ecosystem of factory-workers, managers, compliance, logistics, and finance, with long-term relationships with thousands of international customers.
Bangladesh's garment industry proves that we can build complicated production ecosystems at enormous scale. The challenge is to learn how to reproduce that process of capability-building in other areas.
We don’t need to do everything, but simply to become reliable enough partners to be an integral part of trade networks.
This being said, indispensability doesn’t simply have to be economic. Thinking only economically can become its own trap.
Decades of necessity have also given us an unusual experience in climate adaptation and disaster management. We should ask whether that experience can become useful -- research, technologies, services, and institutional expertise that other countries increasingly need as climate risks spread.
On the reverse, we need to compound all these capabilities. Development will be useless if we don’t grow the country.
Bangladesh’s net FDI rose 39.36% in 2025 to $1.77 billion. That is a victory, but how much of that will remain after 10 years? Are we increasing the capacity of Bangladeshi engineers? Are we acquiring foreign companies and learning from them? Are we building up Bangladeshi ports to export more or better? Or are increasing the momentum of existing structures and making it ever-more difficult to ever do anything different?
One road will lead to compounding wealth, building within 20 years an excess of resources not seen by our people in over 200 years, enriching both the common people and wealthy alike.
The other will lead us to the looming cliff of climatic and economic disaster which will spare neither our workers, nor our factory owners.
All it takes to pick the right options is to study the problem thoughtfully, bring the appropriate experts from wherever they may be in the world for us to learn from, and to think on the timescale of a decade rather than a quarter.
Becoming “indispensable” doesn’t mean to produce something which degrades our unique value such as “being the cheapest,” nor even something which reduces us to a single element such as “being the most advanced.”
It means to be so fully integrated in a wider system that the system cannot work without us -- not politically, not economically, not culturally.
It means being reliable, taking on responsibility, and compounding our existing advantages to build new ones.
It means believing that we can contribute in our own way something of immense value to others, while at the same time as being interdependent with what they produce.
We already have frameworks with which to work; with Nepal, Bhutan, Southeast Asia, East Asia. But to do so, we need to grow to our potential.
Bangladesh will always need partners. The objective should be to become the kind of partner whose absence creates a problem.
Jean-Salman Marre is a General Manager, Strategy at Friendship NGO.