Health awareness. Access to legal aid. Vocational skills training. Good urban governance. We adore communications projects that are set up to promote ideas like these, ideas that are directly linked to the development of Bangladesh.
But equally exciting are projects that promote the creation of business partnerships that lead to development.
So imagine our enthusiasm when the Netherlands Embassy asked us to cover the April 2014 Nyenrode IT-Logistics trade mission to Bangladesh, a four-day event focused on 11 Dutch companies’ introduction to government and potential business partners here in Dhaka.
This event is part of a larger ongoing project partnership between Nyenrode Business University and the Netherlands Embassy in Dhaka to promote business linkages in the four sectors of water, agro, IT, and logistics. You can read about our coverage of the water-agro trade mission that took place in September of last year.
Nyenrode and the Embassy are bringing groups of businessmen back and forth from Bangladesh and the Netherlands to create partnerships see how business partnerships can support development. Just last week in fact, a business delegation of Bangladeshi companies in the IT and logistics industries visited the Netherlands.
Loris Skarpa, Business Development Manager at Lisman Forklifts and one of the businesspeople invited to Bangladesh, summed it up best when he said that organisations like Nyenrode and the Embassy are ‘doing a great job of taking away that extra step involved in traveling to the other side of the world and having to be presented to a company as a serious business partner.’
Trade missions like these make business partnerships easier. Perhaps the most electrifying aspect of the missions have been matchmaking sessions, by which businesspeople from the two countries are paired with possible partners at the same table to discuss opportunities for collaboration.
Overall, this is part of the Netherlands government’s shift ‘from aid to trade’ as Bangladesh’s economy emerges and becomes a more attractive business partner for the future. You can read about this on the Netherlands-Bangladesh Business Platform website.
The Netherlands is already the third-largest investor in Bangladesh behind Malaysia and the UK, and we are really excited to see the Embassy here building upon that already-strong business relationship.
Want to know what the most exciting part of the event was for us? It was hearing that some of the Dutch businessmen we were supposed to interview for the event film (below) would not be available at the scheduled time because they had too many spontaneous meetings scheduled with the young, exciting IT Bangladeshi firms that were participating in the programme.
If someone has to cancel an appointment with us to explore business partnerships here in Dhaka, we could not be happier.
Here’s the film of the event. It includes some wonderful messages of the potential for Dutch-Bangla business partnerships, and more broadly, about the growing potential for Bangladesh.