Leveraging ICT for the Learning Recovery and Acceleration in Bangladesh (English)

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 caused a severe disruption to the global education sector, shuttering schools, and other education institutions for long periods of time. While the authors have seen technology deployed widely prior to and during COVID-19, open questions remain about the potential of ICT4E in developing country contexts such as Bangladesh including a host of quality and equity-related concerns. Moreover, the challenges faced by the sector in the wake of the school closures are immense. Although the Government of Bangladesh responded to the crisis rapidly by adopting remote learning strategies, these modes of instruction cannot replicate the learning gains of in-school instruction. This report aims to focus on the role(s) that technology can play in Bangladesh to strengthen resilience, improve service delivery, and learning and help address learning loss caused by COVID-19. This report explores how the EdTech space has evolved in Bangladesh, focusing on current ICT4E cases across different domains of the basic education sector, and highlights key constraints to more effective deployment of ICT4E. The study suggests ways that the Government of Bangladesh can leverage EdTech to support the post-COVID learning recovery and the basic education sector in short and medium term for a target audience of a wide range of stakeholders, including the relevant ministries of the Government of Bangladesh, World Bank global practices, and other relevant sector colleagues and development partners, among others.