Rajib Ahmed, founder and first president of the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-CAB), has given an interview to Prothom Alo in the association's twelfth anniversary month. He also founded the online learning platform Search English.
How it started
In mid-2014, Ahmed, Abdul Wahed Tamal and Shahed Ali decided the sector needed an association. Forming one required at least seven trade licences or companies. Ahmed says he took the vice-president's role because nobody else would take the presidency.
e-CAB launched formally on 8 November 2014 at the National Press Club, with about 200 people attending — mostly journalists and IT people. No minister came. Ahmed says he told everyone he would serve only one term.
There was no office. Dhanmondi Lake was where the association actually met.
From 3 January 2015, free and open Skype meetups began, running from 10pm to 4am. Nasima Akter Nisha, the only woman on the committee at the time, helped start the women's forum.
The numbers he gives
Ahmed says about 90 per cent of e-commerce entrepreneurs have no office and work from home, and most are aged 20 to 30. He puts the number of entrepreneurs at around 500,000.
On the sector's size, he says a prediction of one billion dollars made in 2016 has become $8–10bn. Transaction volume, he says, went from a 2015 target of 1,000 crore taka to roughly 1 lakh crore taka today.
He also says the Women and E-commerce forum had about 3,500 members in August 2019 and grew to around a million within a year after he took it over.
These are the founder's own figures, given in an interview rather than from an audited survey — which is worth noting partly because one of his own recommendations is that a proper national survey be done before policy is set.
What the association actually did
Two examples he gives are concrete. In 2015 he says he resolved about 200 disputes between courier services and entrepreneurs, including recovering Tk 8 lakh a courier owed a member.
And payment gateways were persuaded to charge a commission of about 3 per cent rather than fees, with bKash charging e-CAB members 1.5 per cent against 2–2.5 per cent for others.
That second one is the clearest answer to what a trade body is for. A single home-based seller has no leverage over a payment gateway. A few thousand of them, counted and represented, do.
What he wants changed
Ahmed proposes raising the ICT Ministry's grants from Tk 50,000 for 2,000 entrepreneurs to Tk 1 lakh for 10,000 entrepreneurs aged 20–35 across 24 districts, selected through an audit firm and spent on delivery charges. He wants taxes and VAT removed from delivery equipment — software, hardware, vehicles and motorcycles.
He argues for expanding beyond Dhaka through divisional cities such as Sylhet and Khulna, since most products originate outside the capital. And he says the government must set a firm deadline for e-CAB's elections, which have been repeatedly postponed since the political change of 5 August.
Oversight of e-commerce has shifted from the ICT Division towards the Commerce Ministry, which Ahmed views positively — his argument being that e-commerce is commerce. As he puts it: "Nobody needs to be convinced about e-commerce anymore."
