Time to honour the entrepreneurs who built modern Bangladesh

Bangladesh rightly honours its intellectual giants. National professors such as Abdur Razzaq and Dewan Mohammad Azraf are remembered for shaping generations of minds. The nation also celebrates exceptional citizens through the Swadhinata Padak and Ekushey Padak, while the Commercially Important Person (CIP) award recognises excellence in commerce. Distinguished entrepreneurs have, from time to time, received these honours, often for their contributions to social service, economic development, or philanthropy. But entrepreneurship itself has never been recognised as a distinct category of national contribution. Entrepreneurial history explains how it built the country’s prosperity. It deserves a permanent place in the nation’s memory.

Entrepreneurial nation-builders are individuals who created institutions that became part of Bangladesh’s national development infrastructure. Sir Fazle Hasan Abed showed how entrepreneurial thinking could transform social development. Samson H Chowdhury helped establish Bangladesh as a credible pharmaceutical and manufacturing power. Syed Manzur Elahi bridged entrepreneurship with public service and institutional reform. Syed Humayun Kabir demonstrated how enterprise and social purpose can advance together. They built companies, but their true legacies lie in the industries they pioneered, the livelihoods they created, the standards they set and the institutions they left behind. Like our finest educators and scientists, they expanded the nation’s capacity not only through vision but by building institutions that continue to serve generations.

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Every Bangladeshi student learns about the nation’s political leaders, language martyrs, scientists, and literary icons because their stories are integral to our national identity. The same principle should apply to entrepreneurial nation-builders. Their stories can tell future generations what kinds of leadership, innovation, and public service a society considers worthy of emulation. As Bangladesh aspires to become a knowledge-driven, innovation-led economy, it should accord the same care to preserving the history of entrepreneurs who helped shape its economic transformation.

Currently, there is no comparable space that chronicles the country’s economic transformation through the lens of entrepreneurship. A permanent gallery or rotating national exhibition could trace the evolution of the RMG industry, pharmaceuticals, agro-processing, information technology, and social enterprise as chapters in the country’s development journey. Such a space would remind visitors that factories, innovations, and enduring institutions are as much a part of the nation’s heritage as its political and cultural milestones.

Much of the country’s entrepreneurial history remains scattered across annual reports, company records, founders’ papers, and fading personal recollections. As the country’s pioneering generation of entrepreneurs passes away, so too does the invaluable record of how modern Bangladesh was built. Preserving this history requires more than private corporate archives. A national business archive and a dedicated centre for business history should be established, which will collect, digitise and curate these materials, commission oral history and biographies, and make them accessible to scholars, students, and the public. Complementing this, an independent entrepreneur hall of fame could honour those whose lifetime contributions transcended commercial success to reshape the nation’s economic and social landscape.

This is, ultimately, a question of heritage. Unesco has broadened our understanding of heritage beyond monuments and historic buildings to include the knowledge, practices, and traditions that societies choose to preserve and pass on. Bangladesh’s entrepreneurial journey deserves to be viewed through the same lens. Perhaps the greatest irony is that some of the country’s finest institutions are already studied more systematically abroad than at home. Harvard University and Ivey Business School have developed teaching cases on BRAC, bKash, and PRAN. If global universities recognise the intellectual value of our entrepreneurial journey, should we not do the same?

Dr Iftekhar Ul Karim is assistant professor at BRAC Business School, BRAC University. He can be reached at iftekhar.karim@bracu.ac.bd. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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