The Future of Socio-Economic Welfare and Resilience is Women
Q. What drew you to the field of economics and international development as a woman in Bangladesh?
Ans. Growing up in Bangladesh, poverty was not something you read about in a textbook. It was visible everywhere, in every street and every conversation. That made the question of development feel urgent rather than academic.
When I went to study at the London School of Economics, I was drawn to the idea that economic systems are not fixed laws of nature. I joined Grameen Trust in 1994, and working alongside Professor Yunus I realised that if people design economic systems, they can be redesigned by people too.
And Grameen has shown me what redesign could look like in practice. Microcredit was not just a financial tool. It was proof that poor women, given the right structure and trust, could become agents of their own development rather than recipients of charity. That changed how I understood economics altogether. It is not about markets in the abstract. It is about dignity, and about whether systems are built to include people or exclude them. Being a woman in this field in Bangladesh has shaped how I work. I have seen first-hand what it means when women are given access to capital, to decision-making, to a seat at the table.
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Q. Has your perspective regarding the participation of women in the business and policymaking industries evolved over the years as you have worked your way in the field? Do you think women have to raise their voices more than men to be recognized?
Ans. When I started at Grameen Trust in the early 1990s, the conversation around women in business and policy was still largely about access, simply getting women into the room. Over three decades, I have watched that conversation shift toward something more demanding: not just presence, but authority. The question now is whether women's judgement carries the same weight once they are there.
I used to believe that competence would speak for itself, that if you did the work well, recognition would follow naturally. But I no longer believe that is sufficient. I have seen too many capable women do excellent work quietly and watch someone else's louder, less substantiated version of the same idea get credited instead.
So yes, I do think women often have to raise their voices more than men to be heard, and I say that with some discomfort. Because it should not be like this. A man's assertiveness is frequently read as leadership. The same assertiveness in a woman is often read as difficulty.
What I try to do now, and what I hope more women in senior positions do, is use whatever authority we have to change that dynamic for those coming after us, so the next generation does not have to shout as loudly simply to be taken at their word.
Q. What inspired you to take up the role of principal coordinator for the Sustainable Development Goals at the Chief Adviser’s office in Bangladesh? What are the biggest challenges that you have faced while navigating this role?
Ans. The invitation came at a moment when Bangladesh was going through a significant political transition. We had just witnessed an uprising led by the country's youth. People were outraged, and rightly so. Years of gigantic corruption and discrimination had built up a pressure that finally broke through, and it was young people, students in particular, who led that break. They gave blood to see that change. It was one of the most striking things I have seen in my career, watching a generation that had grown up largely outside formal politics step forward and demand accountability in a way the country had not seen in decades.
What they wanted was not abstract. They wanted a new Bangladesh, one free from poverty, with equal rights, with no discrimination. That is a demand close to everything I have worked on for the last three decades.
I had spent close to three decades working on the ground with Professor Yunus, translating ideas about social business and poverty alleviation into practice. The SDGs are, in many ways, that same work at a national and global scale. When the Chief Adviser's Office asked me to coordinate that effort, it felt less like a new direction and more like a continuation of what I had already been doing, only now with the machinery of government behind it rather than a single institution. I also felt a responsibility to the young people who had risked so much. Their uprising was not just about removing a government. It was a demand for a fairer, more accountable Bangladesh, and the SDGs, at their core, are a framework for exactly that kind of fairness.
The biggest challenge was coordination itself. The SDGs touch every ministry, every sector, and every level of governance. Getting agencies that were used to operating independently to align around shared targets, shared data, and shared accountability was difficult even in stable times. During a period of political transition, immediately following an uprising, it was harder still. There was limited institutional memory in some offices due to sudden changes in leadership, competing urgent priorities, and a public that, having just given so much for change, was understandably impatient to see results rather than process.
The other challenge was less structural and more personal. Government work moves differently to the social business world I came from. In social business, you can often move quickly and iterate. In government, I was working within processes, precedent, and layers of approval that exist for good reason but slow things down. Learning to be patient with that pace, while still pushing for the urgency that the moment, and the people who had given so much for it, deserved, was its own education.
Q. For those unfamiliar with Bangladesh’s socio-economic and political landscape, what change would you like to see in the way the country is viewed on international platforms?
Ans. For a long time, Bangladesh has been introduced to the world through two competing narratives. One is a story of vulnerability: cyclones, flooding, garment factory tragedies, poverty statistics. The other, more recently, is a story of resilience, the microfinance model, the rise of the ready-made garment sector, steady GDP growth. Both are true, but both are incomplete, and I think that incompleteness is the real problem.
What I would like international platforms to understand is that Bangladesh is not simply a case study, whether of crisis or of recovery. It is a country of over 170 million people actively generating ideas, not just receiving development assistance or serving as an example for others to study from a distance.
Social business, which Professor Yunus pioneered here, did not emerge because Bangladesh had nothing. It emerged because there was a willingness to question inherited economic assumptions and build something new from that questioning. That is intellectual and institutional innovation, and it deserves to be recognised.
I would also like to see Bangladesh's political and civic life discussed with more nuance. The recent political transition here has been closely watched, but it is often flattened into a single storyline for international audiences. The reality on the ground is more layered, with genuine public demand for accountability, a young population that is so powerful in many ways previous generations were not, and institutions still working out what durable, inclusive governance looks like in practice.
Miss Lamiya Morshed
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