Kazi Nasrin Siddiqa

The global conversation around Artificial Intelligence is often dominated by corporate competition, fears of job displacement, algorithmic power and technological acceleration. Yet far from the world’s technology hubs, another story of AI is quietly unfolding — one that forces us to ask what technology means when fundamental human rights are under threat.

For Bangladesh, that story raises a question we can no longer defer: will AI-powered education deepen our existing inequalities, or help us close them? Will it primarily serve a student in an elite urban school with high-speed internet, or a girl in a rural community sharing a single mobile phone with her family? Will it operate mainly in English, or will it become genuinely accessible in Bangla? These are not hypothetical questions. They are the questions Afghanistan’s girls, denied the classroom altogether, have already forced the world to confront.

A Digital Lifeline Beyond Physical Walls

Since girls in Afghanistan were excluded from formal secondary and higher education, the world has watched with growing concern. But alongside this tragedy, Afghan women and education innovators have shown extraordinary resilience, refusing to let the closure of physical classrooms become the closure of their intellectual lives.

This resilience is embodied in SOLAx, the WhatsApp-based online academy co-founded by Shabana Basij-Rasikh — president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA) and one of the most recognized advocates for Afghan girls’ education — together with edtech entrepreneur Mati Amin. By delivering a structured curriculum in English, Dari and Pashto through an ordinary messaging app, SOLAx has enrolled tens of thousands of students across dozens of countries, requiring nothing more than a basic phone and a cellular connection. The organization has also begun exploring how generative AI could deepen this model further, moving from static lessons toward more responsive, tailored learning support.

The image is powerful: somewhere behind closed doors, a young woman with a simple mobile phone continues to learn. This is not merely a story about technology; it is a story about human agency. It reminds us that when people are denied access to knowledge, they do not lose the desire to seek it. When physical doors close, they search for digital windows — proof that a society’s appetite for knowledge cannot simply be legislated away.

The Fragility of Social Progress

As a woman from Bangladesh — a Muslim-majority country that has made significant progress in girls’ education and women’s participation in public life — I find the Afghan experience both deeply painful and profoundly instructive. To be clear, the two situations differ in degree, not merely detail: Afghanistan represents an outright legal ban on girls’ education, while Bangladesh’s challenge is one of uneven access and infrastructure. But the underlying lesson travels across that difference. Bangladesh has earned real gains in female literacy, girls’ enrollment, women’s workforce participation and grassroots leadership. These achievements should give us pride, but never complacency. Social progress is not permanent simply because it has been achieved once.

Across societies, including our own, debates about women’s mobility, autonomy and public participation continue to resurface, often framed through arguments about culture, tradition or social values. The experience of Afghan girls offers a powerful counterargument: no society becomes stronger by narrowing the opportunities of half its population.

Redefining Technology Equity for Bangladesh

The most important question for Bangladesh is no longer whether we will adopt AI — we already are. The real question is whether AI will deepen existing inequalities or help us reduce them.

True equity means recognizing that access goes far beyond basic connectivity. A student may technically have internet access but still lack a personal device, digital literacy, language proficiency, teacher support or a safe learning environment. Without deliberate intervention, AI risks becoming another layer of exclusion rather than a bridge.

Designing a “Bangladesh First” AI Strategy

Bangladesh needs a technology strategy rooted in its own realities. A “Bangladesh First” approach does not mean rejecting global innovation or isolating ourselves from the world. It means asking a fundamental question before adopting any technological solution: does this work for the everyday realities of Bangladesh?

For technological adoption to represent genuine progress, it must serve rural learners, function on low-bandwidth networks, support Bangla-language contexts, and empower — not sideline — teachers. This requires investment not only in basic infrastructure, but in inclusive AI ecosystems: affordable connectivity and targeted device-access programs; context-aware, Bangla-language AI educational tools; digital literacy training for educators; and robust safeguards for user data and privacy.

This is not an abstract exercise. Bangladesh’s own Education Sector Analysis 2026, prepared jointly by UNICEF and the education ministry, found that only half of children aged seven to fourteen have achieved foundational literacy, and roughly one million primary-school-aged children remain out of school altogether — a baseline any AI strategy must reckon with before it can meaningfully change outcomes. Encouragingly, the government is not starting from zero. The ICT Division’s Aspire to Innovate (a2i) program has budgeted a “One Teacher, One Tab” initiative for the 2026–27 fiscal year, placing tablets loaded with lesson plans and learning-gap tracking tools directly in teachers’ hands. Its Bangla-language AI infrastructure already offers Bengali speech-to-text, text-to-speech and grammar-correction tools, and its Shikkhok Batayon chatbot has piloted Bengali-language learning support for rural students, albeit at limited scale. What none of these efforts yet carry is a deliberate gender lens. Unless girls’ access is built into their next phase — the way SOLAx built its entire model around Afghan girls specifically — these programs risk replicating the very inequities they are meant to solve.

Crucially, girls and young women must not merely be passive consumers of this technology, but its creators, researchers, innovators and leaders.

Architects of the Technological Future

The Afghan experience exposes an uncomfortable contradiction in global development. We live in an era of ambitious declarations about digital inclusion and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, yet progress cannot be measured solely by breakthroughs in advanced economies while millions remain excluded from basic learning. A truly transformative technology agenda must begin with those at the margins.

For Bangladesh, Afghanistan should not simply be a distant tragedy that evokes sympathy. It is a reminder that educational progress, women’s rights and social inclusion must constantly be protected and renewed. If girls living under extreme restrictions can leverage decentralized digital tools to keep learning, countries with greater freedom and resources carry an even greater responsibility to ensure no student is left behind.

The future of Bangladesh will not be secured merely by acquiring advanced technology, but by ensuring that technology expands human freedom. The women and girls of Bangladesh must continue to learn, innovate and lead — not simply as beneficiaries of technological progress, but as its primary architects

The writer is an Echidna Global Scholar of the Brookings Institution, USA, a former Consultant of The World Bank and Executive Director of ECS – Education & Cultural Society (NGO).