Preparations are afoot to invite the leading global firms to provide training to 30,000 Bangladeshi youths under the World Bank-financed ‘Leveraging ICT (LICT) for Growth, Employment and Governance Project’ of the government.
Prior to inviting tender for selecting the international IT/ITES training providing firms for the Bangladeshi youths, Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) under the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has already floated tender for four major activities of its LICT for Growth, Employment and Governance Project, said a press release on Tuesday.
The activities are: Establishing Enterprise Architecture and Interoperability Framework, IT and Information Technology –enabled Services (ITES) Industry promotion services on Marketing and Communications, Development of IT/ITES Industry Strategy and Roadmap and Industry Statistics gathering and Consultancy Services for IT audit and expansion of existing Datacenter.
According to the source, the World Bank (WB) will finance US$70 million in the LICT for Growth, Employment and Governance Project that would create 30,000 direct jobs and 120,000 indirect ones.
“Our target is to increase growth of our IT industries to 100 percent this year from the present 50 percent. LICT for Growth, Employment and Governance would help achieving the target as we would impart foundation skill training to 20,000 ITES/Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) would-be professionals and Top-Up IT training to 10,000 Non-IT Science graduates through internationally reputed IT firms under the project,” said ICT secretary Nazrul Islam Khan.
He said Bangladesh, in fact, will be benefited as the project would enhance employment opportunities in the booming global IT/ITES industry.
As per the WB study, the project is expected to increase the IT and ITES industry revenue by over US$200 million by the end of the project, he said adding that this project will eloquently leverage ICT for growth, employment and employment and make enable the country to tap into the tremendous potential of global IT and ITES industry for economic and social development.
A study conducted by the World Bank in 2009 indicated that Bangladesh possesses significant comparative advantage in the IT and Information Technology-Enabled Services (ITES) due to availability of a large English-educated talent pool and competitive labor costs.
In addition, the industry possesses particular strengths in niche sub-segments such as software programming, graphics and animation.
The WB said the project would directly benefit 30,000 youth who will gain marketable and globally recognized IT and ITES skills. Among them 9,000 will be women, it added.
According to project document, the project will also establish basic e-Government foundations to support governance reforms and significantly improve the government’s efficiency and effectiveness. More specifically, the proposed technology foundation will enable the ministries and agencies to host their systems and information on a shared datacenter, exchange information and collaborate using standardized frameworks; and protect data through information security policies and standards.
Source: UNB Connect