Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) launched a summit to organize and participate in a series of Information Technology (IT) fairs, seminars, and B2B meetings to find more European Investor into Bangladesh IT sector.
It is a goal of the Europe-Bangladesh Technology Summit is to achieve IT sector exports worth $1 billion by 2018 and create one million jobs for local IT expert as well as fresh graduates under the Bangladesh base campaign, said Shamim Ahsan, president of BASIS.
A team of IT experts from Bangladesh joined a five-day IT fair in Hanover, Germany, from March 10 under the campaign, BASIS president said at a press meet at at hotel in Dhaka on March 13, 2014.
The new summit aims to promote Bangladesh as the IT destination for business process outsourcing (BPO) for Europeans Investor as well as Multi-national companies.
Last year, Bangladesh achieved exports in IT and IT-related services worth $100 million, Shamim Ahsan said.
Bangladesh has 200,000 IT professionals in different filed, 80,000 of whom are working in IT sector, 60,000 working as freelancers and the rest are with other sectors in IT section.
BASIS earlier initiated similar events in Dhaka and at Silicon Valley in USA, said Fahim Mashroor, convener of the upcoming BASIS summit.
15 Bangladeshi IT firms are participating in different events in Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, and 11 Dutch companies will come to Dhaka in April, He said.
Everyone should work together to achieve the goals set by BASIS, and the recent launch of 3G services by mobile operators should help meet demand for internet, said Vivek Sood, chief executive of Grameenphone.
Bangladesh has plenty of qualified IT manpower that is an attraction for foreign investors, said Hanne Fugl Eskjaer, Danish ambassador to Dhaka.
IT infrastructure in Bangladesh should be developed and training is required for the IT professional to reach the goals set by BASIS, Eskjaer added.
The Export Promotion Bureau, Agrani Bank and Grameenphone are assisting BASIS with the summit, while Telenor, Innovation Norway, Danish Federation of SME are co-organisers.
