Sarzah Yeasmin is a researcher on international education policy, technology and public policy. She holds a master’s degree in international education policy from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Mount Holyoke College in the United States.

She has worked with a range of international and academic institutions including the World Bank, UNICEF, Harvard University and NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research and professional interests span education technology, artificial intelligence, labour market transformation, digital governance and public policy.

In a recent interview with Bonik Barta, she spoke about the challenges of labour export from Bangladesh, the role of the education sector in producing skilled and creative workers, and the need to transform education infrastructure. Interview conducted by Sabidin Ibrahim.

Remittances are such an important pillar of Bangladesh’s economy. But just how sustainable is our model of labour export?

Well, when we think about Bangladesh’s migration model, we have to keep a few things in mind. The people who go abroad tend to have very low skills, which means they’re stuck in a small, low-wage market. On top of that, they face steep extra costs and really poor security. We send workers to 160 countries, but 90 percent of them are chasing a livelihood in just five Middle Eastern nations. That shows how heavily we depend on that region. So whenever there’s a crisis or conflict there, we feel the pressure instantly. Meanwhile, those Middle Eastern countries are trying to nationalise their workforces. Even so, they’re switching their focus to education and services rather than manufacturing. If their economic activities shift, there could also be a tectonic change in our labour market sources. And our population is so huge that sending people abroad remains the only beneficial option. The issue is, we’re managing this workforce with low expectations and weak systems. According to ILO statistics, workers from similar developing countries can go abroad at a much lower cost than what a Bangladeshi worker has to spend. Here, they have to pay brokers, sell land, take out high-interest loans, plus all sorts of other fees. It takes at least 16 to 17 months for an expatriate to clear those expenses. So, we’re essentially managing labour migration from a position of economic weakness.

Then there’s another caveat — the persistent skills gap. The Bureau of Manpower Training data shown only 3 percent of our migrant labour is in the professional category. Globally, we’ve already got a poor reputation in the global market — Bangladesh is known for cheap labour. We first need to break out of this one-dimensional aspect if we want to build a sustainable migration model.

There are other issues too. A lot of informal practices are being done. It’s now much easier to set up a company in the Gulf, but many in the Bangladeshi diaspora are sliding into the business of selling visas. And contract substitutions cause another trouble. Someone might sign a contract to do one type of work, but once they arrive, they’re pushed into a completely different sector. This sort of thing has started happening in Europe as well. All of this deepens the skills deficit, and workers lose jobs simply because they can’t adapt to a new setting. The problem is multi-pronged.

So, what can be done to produce more professional and skilled workers? And is the country’s education system actually becoming a barrier here?

In the Gulf, you’ll find many Indians, Filipinos and Sri Lankans working in the hospitality sector. But Bangladeshis are hardly ever seen in managerial roles. A key reason is our linguistic weakness. Each country has its own language, of course, but English works as the second language. Our fundamental crisis, though, is a weakness in both social and emotional communication.

The diaspora networks of India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam are incredibly strong — they’re involved at every stage of recruitment. Their embassies are powerful too. They’ve built a kind of social organisation that we simply haven’t managed. That’s down to our lack of capacity and weak leadership. Take Qatar: there are four to five lakh Bangladeshi workers there, yet they have just one workers’ council. If you go to the Bangladeshi embassy, you’ll see enormous queues. There’s also a hotline, but the workers know nothing about it. That shows that our embassies lack the capacity, and also we’re not able to create awareness. Now the Gulf is preparing itself as a knowledge-focused service-oriented economy.

Recently, our policy-makers have been talking about emphasising knowledge-based education, saying primary classrooms might be put under CCTV. But that’s just fiddling with the superstructure. Our education system is in such a state that many students are simply disengaged — we need to find out why they’re drifting away. CCTV alone won’t fix things. It’s not right to install cameras in classrooms without a profound reason, because if students feel they’re constantly being monitored, it stunts their intellectual growth. Ultimately, we want to raise dignified citizens who will serve the nation. If we want to teach them respect, we have to show them respect. There’s a glaring lack of critical thinking in our system. We should be nurturing empathy, curiosity, creativity. We need to move towards project-based learning, social and emotional skill-building pedagogy. Our curriculum must also change. Our curriculum is still competing with those of the 190 to 195 countries. Our labour force has to compete globally with workers from India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore. If we’re going to survive that competition, we need to do a root cause analysis and create a student-centric pedagogy.

How can we move forward, given the shifting global labour market?

We have to go back to the classroom. Failing outside the classroom is far more costly than failing inside it. We need to normalise failure in education, change our whole mindset, and break free of this obsession with GPA 5. Let’s think about how much that top grade actually shapes our students’ lives and livelihoods. Now, it’s not that construction work in the Middle East will vanish entirely. There’ll always be demand for it, but those are very cheap labour jobs. Bangladeshis lean towards them because our manpower skills are in such a poor state — yet not everyone wants that kind of work. Saudi Arabia is driving its Vision 2030, building smart cities, green tech, food security. The arid desert is being modernised for agriculture; they’re even hosting the 2034 Football World Cup. So construction won’t disappear. Qatar, meanwhile, is rolling out several agri-product initiatives. Visit a Qatari farm and you’ll see Bangladeshis working there. So some demand for such labour will remain. But to create a learner-based foundation, we have to start from the very beginning. We need to strengthen public-private partnerships, public-public partnerships, and the cooperative ties between people and government agencies. So much of our system has gone informal, giving brokers endless opportunities. Ordinary people suffer, and we’ve somehow come to see that as normal. Just recently, 22 people died on a boat from Libya to Italy. Our legal pathways are broken, and we’re not taking proper legal action to stop human trafficking.

The conflict in the Middle East is hurting our labour market. What alternative global markets and regions have potential for exporting workers?

Besides diversifying our skills, we also need to expand our labour destination. Recently, Western and Eastern Europe are emerging as new markets for our migrants. But our legal labour export system has collapsed because it simply doesn’t function well. Even those who go legally often struggle because the contracts are weak. There are a lot of Bangladeshis in Portugal’s farm-based labour market, and the produce from there is exported all over the EU. Bangladeshis play a vital role in those operations. We’re also seeing many people go to Romania and Japan. Japan and New Zealand have an ageing population, so they’re looking for service-sector workers. Caregiving doesn’t require a lot of skills. So Bangladesh could explore these markets.

What advice would you give the newly elected government on labour issues?

We have to do a root cause analysis. A good policy always builds a social connection and produces dignified citizens. We’ve to put human dignity first. Our human rights infrastructure needs to be strengthened. We’ve got to make sure our workers can earn a dignified living and stay safe while they’re abroad.

Artificial intelligence and technology are reshaping labour markets. How will Bangladeshi workers fit into this new landscape?

Artificial Intelligence will affect Bangladesh much later, because the country hasn’t advanced that far technologically. The advanced nations are the ones that’ll see massive change. Here, we need to focus on creativity and critical thinking skills — understanding how AI works and how to harness it for good. That means building a mindset geared towards productivity and efficiency. We also need to grasp AI’s limitations and the crises it might bring. The further we go with critical thinking, the better we’ll be at guiding AI effectively. In that context, social and emotional skills will become ever more important. AI might offer us clever solutions to technical or mathematical problems, but when it comes to life and livelihoods, we have to engage with other people socially and emotionally. People have to be directly involved there. So we have to focus on the 4 Cs — creativity, curiosity, compassion, critical thinking.

We have 11 different types of primary education, and during the pandemic we saw a digital divide. So a crisis has emerged. How do we deal with that? And how do we address the challenges of having 11 types of primary education?

Those 11 types reflect everything from socio-economic conditions to politics, and they’re fragmenting our society. We already have middle-class, low-income, and upper-class divisions, but it goes much deeper. That fragmentation makes us prone to conflict. When we’re divided so early on, it kills communication and coordination. Public discourse gets very rough. We’re driving ourselves into greater loneliness, and algorithms play a part too — they only show us the kind of news and opinions we want to see. So we get trapped in our own bubbles, leaning towards a specific viewpoint and justifying it by saying we’re keeping up with the news. The bridges of public communication are breaking down.

All the top educational institutions are in the capital, while the remote areas lack well-equipped ones. What should we do about that?

We need to modernise our teachers and education infrastructure. Teachers’ salaries are terribly low in our country, so many talented people aren’t interested in the profession. Their morale is weak because of low status and poor benefits, and they don’t get proper training. Teaching hasn’t become a genuine profession. It’s tough to develop infrastructure in remote areas, yes, but that’s why we must raise teachers’ pay, give them professional training, and boost their standing there. Good, skilled teachers will produce good students. It’s a difficult task, but it has to be done; we have to build that structure. Singapore was a poor country in the 1960s, and so was Malaysia. They overhauled their education sectors. Bangladesh was once on a similar footing. Our change now has to start from the top. And when we talk about education, we can’t just focus on academics. What children do after school, who they spend time with — that’s equally important. The education structure is part of an ecosystem. If we can implement the policies based on the ecosystem, we could see some changes.