Information and communication technology training programmes under the Awami League regime failed to generate jobs, relied on fake and inflated data and were captured by political and patronage networks, despite spending around Tk1 lakh crore, according to an ICT Whitepaper published on Thursday.
According to the document, short-term freelancing and ICT training initiatives under the previous government’s digital Bangladesh agenda did not create a sustainable pool of skilled freelancers, directly contradicting official claims of mass employment and income generation.
It found systemic governance failures across projects implemented by the ICT Division and its affiliated agencies, including fake trainees, inflated attendance, fabricated management information system data, irregular vendor payments and politically motivated beneficiary selection, even in donor-funded programmes such as EDGE and LICT.
Political interference, the document said, distorted project design, with training centres, grants and hardware distribution repeatedly used for visibility, patronage and ideological screening rather than skills development or labour market needs.
Between 2009 and 2024, at least 13 projects were fully training-focused and another 21 included major training components, with rapid expansion after 2016 and allocations in 2022 alone exceeding Tk57,400 crore, the whitepaper noted.
By 2022, 19 active training-related projects together absorbed nearly Tk9.5 lakh crore, yet operated without a unified national strategy, effective inter-agency coordination or credible alignment with labour market demand.
Severe overlap and duplication were identified, with multiple government bodies running near-identical ICT training programmes with the same objectives, curricula and geographic coverage, resulting in waste rather than skills.
The Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority was singled out for operating expensive training centres despite having no legal mandate for training delivery, no assessment of trainer availability and no sustainability or manpower planning, turning infrastructure into largely idle assets.
According to the whitepaper, corruption and irregularities were routine, with evidence of inflated batch sizes, fake attendance registers, fabricated trainee identities and unsupported expenditure claims across several projects.
Payment models tied to numerical key performance indicators such as numbers trained or jobs claimed encouraged data manipulation and collusion between vendors and officials, rewarding paperwork compliance instead of real outcomes.
In the Learning and Earning Development Project, employment invoices were allegedly fabricated and the identities of many so-called successful freelancers could not be independently verified.
The document also found that freelancing course content, including web development training, was outdated and misaligned with current global platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, leaving trainees uncompetitive despite certificates and completion claims.
Spending with no credible link to skills development was flagged, including more than Tk11 crore spent on LED digital billboards under LEDP, which the whitepaper said served publicity rather than training outcomes.
Laptop distribution under LEDP was allegedly linked to political events and ideological background checks, effectively conditioning access to state-funded benefits on political considerations rather than merit.
Political capture was further exposed in the Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Academy project, where Tk50,000 SME grants were channelled through politically connected MPs, organisations and networks.
Nearly 30 per cent of iDEA grant recipients could not be traced, raising serious questions about whether public money reached real beneficiaries.
Donor-funded projects were also implicated, with the World Bank-supported EDGE programme found to have inflated attendance figures, excessive expense claims and weak audits despite international oversight.
In the EDGE Hire and Train component, only 62% of trainees could be contacted and just 33.8% of those tracked were actually employed, directly contradicting repeated public claims of 80% placement rates.
The earlier LICT project, which claimed to have trained 30,000 individuals, was never formally evaluated for impact or cost-effectiveness despite cost escalation from Tk522 crore to Tk775 crore.
The whitepaper criticised routine bypassing of the National Skills Development Authority, noting that most ICT training certificates were issued based on attendance rather than competency and were not aligned with national standards.
It concluded that the collapse of Bangladesh’s ICT training portfolio was systemic, not technical, driven by political capture, weak accountability, distorted incentives and an obsession with visible outputs over verifiable outcomes.
With ICT exports stagnating and skilled employment growth remaining modest, the whitepaper warned that continuing to expand poorly governed training programmes would only deepen the skills crisis while burning more public funds.
