BANGLADESH, as reported in the media, is emerging as the hub of freelancers with a young population base, trained in IT skills coupled with advances in technology. More and more Bangladeshis are now taking up the freelance route, with flexible working hours. It is considered a bonus in the face of inadequate opportunity for quality jobs, especially for young graduates at the home market. Freelance jobs in software development, customer service, data entry, writing, editing, blogging, accounting, mobile apps development, web development, search engine optimisation, graphic design and translations are all there at the advantages of our youths to take up. A top freelancer said, businesses spent around $930 million on hiring remote independent workers around the globe in 2014, up from $750 million of 2013. The amount is expected to reach $10 billion by 2020.
The traditional geographic boundaries have disappeared with the global rise of low cost computing and internet communications, reinforcing David Ricardo’s 1817 theory of comparative advantage of market economy that allows economies to benefit from efficiencies of global specialisation. A Bangladeshi freelancer can now work for a US or UK company sitting in his remote village and a good number of youths are relentlessly working with “keyboard and mouse” and earning better wages in hard currencies. This open job option is helping the stranded employment situation caused by embattled economy to come out of the strains. The news report said, fresh-out of colleges and universities graduates are on course to earn about $100 million a year by 2020 working freelance remaining in homes. Despite political uncertainty, voracious corruption, and unchecked practice of dishonesty in the entire state mechanism, the enthusiastic young generation is hopefully helping the economy to roll.
Bangladesh is ranked seventh among 186 countries in terms of earnings through freelancing and currently around 5.5 lakh Bangladeshi freelancers have registered with different freelance marketplaces. The opportunity remains open to all having the IT knowledge and access to it. Anyone can earn money freelancing if he or she knows the work properly, suggested a freelancer, who is studying for his Fazil degree at a madrasa in Demra.
Anyway, the freelancers are not passing easy days. They are facing odds like — inadequate IT infrastructure, high tariff charges, tax-barriers, obstructed power supply and lack of venture capital.
If the government can provide a faster internet service at a lower price, it would make work a lot easier for the talented and hardworking freelancers of the country. Freelancing has the potential to do for Bangladesh what it did for the Philippines — lifting it from abject poverty to be a fast growing economy.
