The second Bangladesh – UK Trade and Investment Dialogue was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 19 February 2023. The communique can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/bangladesh-uk-trade-and-investment-dialogue-2023.

The UK emphasised the importance placed on trade and investment within HMG objectives for the prosperity of the UK, and for Bangladesh as it graduates from Least Developed Country (LDC) status, stressing the role of the dialogue in deepening the UK-Bangladesh trade relationship.

It was agreed that the Joint Working Group will meet regularly to make progress in areas such as LDC graduation, investment cooperation, pharmaceuticals, ease of doing business, financial sector development, higher education provision, taxation issues and intellectual property protection.

In the area of Cross Border Higher Education (CBHE), the High Commissioner highlighted the importance placed on human capital development within the Bangladesh Vision 2041 and described the opportunity that opening market access to UK HEIs would create in increasing the quality of provision of higher education enabling Bangladesh to seize its demographic dividend from the youth population enabling them to become powerful agents of economic development.

The UK side welcomed the publication of the Rules for Operating a Foreign University Branch Campus or Study Centre 2014 and that there had been recent success for the London School of Economics in establishing collaboration in Bangladesh with a local institution Universal College Bangladesh (UCB) offering BSc Business and Management , BSc Finance, and BSc Accounting and Finance courses with 100% curriculum and testing from the London School of Economics. However, there has been some disappointment due to lack of clarity on the position of the nine applications submitted by UK universities in 2015 who applied through CBHE rule to operate in Bangladesh. On the Bangladesh side, it was emphasised that the Ministry of Education was now ready to take things forward and participants from the Ministry of Commerce and Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) expressed their support.

In terms on next steps, the UK government has invited the Minister of Education, the Honourable Dr Dipu Moni to London for the Education World Forum and it was agreed that this would be a good opportunity to review progress in opening up market access, particularly for higher education provision.  Further, representatives from Department of Business and Trade and British Council have scheduled meetings with senior officials and the minister to address the issues raised in the dialogue.