Bangladesh Bank plans to launch a nationwide “One Village One Product (OVOP)” scheme that aims to channel BDT 100 billion in financing through 52 banks to rural producers, with the goal of generating employment for more than 10 million people and pushing distinctive village products into export markets.
The central bank has formed a committee to drive the initiative, chaired by Mashrur Arefin, chairman of the Association of Bankers, Bangladesh and managing director of City Bank. Arefin told Bonik Barta on Sunday that the committee had held its first meeting at the central bank to review the blueprint, where City Bank Deputy Managing Director Ashanur Rahman presented the project’s contours.
“We’re working to push this forward,” Arefin said, adding that with a collective effort “something very good will emerge for the country’s marginalised entrepreneurs”.
Bangladesh’s economy has expanded substantially but job creation has not kept pace. Employment elasticity fell from 1.1 to 0.12 between 2000 and 2024, while roughly 2 million people enter the labour market each year and 84 percent remain trapped in informal work. Exports, meanwhile, pivot almost entirely on the ready-made garment sector, leaving non-brand rural goods without the financing to break into formal supply chains.
Under the OVOP plan, producers will be organised into clusters of at least 50 within a five-kilometre radius across all 64 districts. The initiative rests on seven pillars: product and cluster selection, cluster development and value-chain linkage, financing and financial inclusion, market access and branding, institutional structure, skills development, and digital infrastructure.
Implementation is planned in three phases: cluster selection, registration and initial financing in the first year; national expansion and market-platform construction in the second; and full rollout across 68,000 villages by the third year. The target is to bring more than 10 million producers and entrepreneurs into the fold over the period.
Arefin said the goal was to take the famous products of every district to a global market. “These goods have national demand as well as consumers abroad,” he said. “But without finance and oversight, the sector can’t grow.”
The plan proposes a shift from conventional collateral-based lending to value-chain financing that covers production, processing, logistics and export. It also mandates a digital-first architecture: every producer will receive a digital identity, alternative-data credit scoring will be deployed, and QR-code traceability will be applied to products.
A national brand, “Bangladesh OVOP”, is to be created, drawing on geographic and cultural identities such as Rajshahi’s mangoes or Jamdani sarees. Of the total BDT 100 billion budget, roughly half has been earmarked for market access and digital infrastructure. The central bank expects each unit of public investment to mobilise between five and ten times that amount in private credit.