Azm Saif
July 11, 2024
As the scorching sun blazes down on Rakib, he tries his best to maintain the focus necessary to take care of the long line of customers standing in line outside his shop. The fan is broken, the bulb above his register is flickering, and Rakib is losing his patience. One of his regular customers steps up in line and insists she deserves to get more credit this month. Rakib scrambles around for his ‘hal-khatha’ only to find, in the heat, the ink is completely smudged. The red line is now crossed. He raises his voice and tells the customer there’s nothing he can do, and she storms off. Rakib has lost a loyal customer, his patience is gone, and the fan still isn’t working. While these small annoyances may seem to be just that – annoyances – they’re tangibly detrimental for a small business owner like Rakib.
The reason behind this is while these problems may seem disconnected, in reality, they’re part of a larger systematic issue. The fan is off because Rakib doesn’t have the time to go to the bKash counter and cash out to pay the repairman, and he’s incapable of sending cash through the app. The ‘hal-khatha’ is smudged because Rakib doesn’t have any time on his hands to service customers and keep his accounts at the same time. It is a lack of localised, appropriate technological solutions that are now the bane of Rakib’s professional existence. And like Rakib, millions of others in Bangladesh are in desperate need of a change.
In the midst of the startup boom in Bangladesh, somewhere along the line, we’ve lost track of what creates real value. In the blinding light of awards, news coverage and fame, we began importing ideas to solve problems that are specific to our localities. You can build the next ride-sharing app, you can build the newest OTT, and you can build the latest MFS. But where is the utility if no one knows how to use it, and no one can use it? Bangladesh has an assisted digital literacy rate of 23%, and a full digital literacy rate of just above 6%, indicating that no matter how nice the newest UI of an app may be, its usefulness to the everyday Bangali will always be nil.
Zubair Ahmed, a venture capitalist sitting in Japan, recognised this in 2014. Instead of choosing to continue his comfortable life abroad, Zubair took the difficult call so many Bangladeshis abroad refuse to take – he dropped everything and came back to Bangladesh to solve the problem. By intuition and through exposure to technology solutions as a venture capitalist, he knew there was only one way forward to solve the Gordian knot of digital illiteracy – conversational voice technology powered by telephony networks in Bangla. While Google, Amazon, and Apple raced to come up with a solution, Zubair through his hat into the race. And in that moment, Hishab was born. Audacious? Yes. Impossible? No.