Dhaka’s AI Test, Set in Istanbul: Govern fFrst, Adopt Second
Speaking at a two-day conference in Istanbul, Science and Technology and ICT Minister Faqir Mahbub Anam called for technology transfer, training and affordable access to prevent a widening AI divide.
Faqir Mahbub Anam, Minister of Science and Technology and ICT, used the opening slot of a two-day meeting in Istanbul to argue that Bangladesh, and the governments sitting with it, should stop treating artificial intelligence as a procurement contest. The posts, telecommunications and information technology minister said the standard is whether a state can run AI with public trust, institutions that can actually operate it, and help from outside its own borders.
He spoke on 6 October for 12 countries at a conference called "AI Governance in Practice: Practical Use Cases, Institutional Capacity, Innovation at Scale and Global Cooperation." The session runs through 7 October. Hosts and organisers are the Republic of Korea, the Astana Civil Service Hub, the United Nations Development Programme, and Türkiye. The room includes ministers, senior officials, UNDP staff, and development partners drawn from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Asia-Pacific.
The line he wanted remembered was this: today's digital divide must not harden into tomorrow's AI divide. That, he said, is Bangladesh's commitment. AI, in his account, has already left the future tense. It is reshaping how officials decide, how services reach people, and how development programmes are built. Adopting it quickly is not the achievement. Governing it with judgment, responsibility, and room for those now left out is.
He broke that into three jobs. The first is trust: systems used by the state have to be responsible, open to scrutiny, answerable when they fail, and organised around citizens rather than around the software. The second is capacity: hardware and models do nothing useful without trained people, offices able to run them, disciplined handling of data, and laws that exist before the tools spread. The third is cooperation. He said no single country has the full set of answers, so the durable path is to trade experience across borders.
Anam linked the argument to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman's speech at the United Nations General Assembly, which held that AI should shrink inequalities already in place instead of minting new ones. From that he drew a practical ask: transfer of technology, training, and prices low enough that advanced tools are not reserved for the richest administrations. He said he wanted the Istanbul meeting to be a working floor for inclusive technology, with no country parked outside, and he pressed delegations to turn broad principles into projects that can be repeated at scale. Bangladesh, he said, will back that move.
The caution fits a country where AI is already visible in fragments. Mobile operators sell subscriptions to foreign models. A national innovation award has just honoured diagnostic and care tools built at home. Students are shipping prototypes. Under that layer, most people still reach the internet through a handset, computer ownership barely grows, and local data-centre capacity is a small fraction of the countries that train the models. If those facts stay fixed, the next wave of government service will sort people the same way the current network already does.
The Istanbul statement does not name the first ministry pilot, the audit office, the rule on citizen data, or the training plan for clerks who still work from paper files. Anam's own measure for the hall applies at home as well. A speech can set the pillars. The result is whether trust, capacity, and cooperation appear in a service counter, not only on a conference programme.