When we first spoke of a Digital Bangladesh, many considered it a distant dream for a country still building its roads and its power grid. But I have always believed that the shortest path out of poverty runs through opportunity, and opportunity today runs through connection.

A farmer checking crop prices on a handset. A student in a village attending a class taught in the capital. A young entrepreneur registering a business without ever visiting an office. These are not conveniences. They are the quiet redistribution of possibility to people who were, for too long, told to wait their turn.

We still have work ahead of us. But I have watched a generation grow up assuming that reach and voice are theirs by right, not by privilege, and that has been worth every difficult step.

There is a kind of decision a country makes quietly, without press conferences: whether to look away, or to open the door. When families began arriving on our southern border with nothing but what they could carry, we chose to open it.

It was not, and is not, a simple choice. Resources are finite, and our own citizens have their own needs that must be met. But a nation that was itself born from displacement and loss understands, perhaps more than most, what it means to have nowhere else to go.

I am proud of what our people did in those months and the years since: sharing land, food and patience with people who had lost everything else. It is one of the responsibilities of leadership to make room for compassion even when it is costly.

I grew up watching the women in my family carry households, communities and, in the hardest years, each other. It shaped how I think about development: not as a set of statistics, but as a question of who gets to stand at the centre of it.

We have worked to put girls in classrooms, women in parliament, and women's cooperatives at the heart of rural economies, not as a gesture, but because it is simply good policy. A nation that educates and employs half its population at a fraction of its potential is a nation working against itself.

There is more to do, and I am the first to say our work is unfinished. But the direction is not in question.

Bangladesh was born, in part, from a fight over language: the right to speak, teach and dream in Bangla. That history is not a museum piece to me. It is a living instruction about what a nation owes its own culture.

As we build highways and data networks, I have tried to make sure we are also protecting our folk music, our textiles, our festivals and our rivers, the things that cannot be imported or rebuilt once lost. Development that erases identity is not development at all.

Wherever I travel, I carry this with me: progress and heritage are not opposites. The strongest nations are the ones who manage to hold both at once.