Saxenian’s concept of ‘brain circulation’ explains how a developing country can benefit when its diaspora community returns home to accelerate economic growth, but it says little about who leaves a country in the first place, and why they leave. We consider this issue in the context of Bangladesh’s IT sector and focus on university students’ aspirations for careers abroad. Based on a survey of 591 undergraduate IT students, we find that students’ aspirations bifurcate into those hoping to work in English-speaking developed countries and those expecting to remain in Bangladesh, and that the difference correlates with parental income, attendance at elite universities, gender, and the presence of role models. We also find that parental income is predictive of what factors students value in a job. Findings are discussed in relation to socio-cognitive career theory, with implications for interventions that could improve IT brain circulation in Bangladesh and beyond.

ICTD benefits from being a broad multidisciplinary field that unites researchers from a wide range of domains attempting to understand the role of ICTs in the context of social, economic and political development. As a new field of study, however, ICTD continuously grapples with epistemological differences and varying (and often evolving) notions of what counts as development, and there still exists a significant gap in outlining where the current boundaries of this field lie. In this paper we present \"Missing Pieces,\" an ongoing research project with the primary aim of uncovering the constitution, development, growth and impact of ICTD. Through in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses of the distribution of participation in and impact of ICTD research across places, people, institutions, organizations and funding agencies, this project will look beyond just trends, and instead focus on finding the missing pieces, i.e. what, or rather who is being left out.

Many countries wish to achieve digital transformation, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The digital skills demand is changing fast. The time-series online job portal data for the ICT industry in Bangladesh provides an opportunity to analyze high demand job titles and skills over time. These time-series data address the question of the speed of changes in job titles and skills and responsiveness of computer science and engineering (CSE) curricula. This study gathers online job portal data of the ICT industry in Bangladesh from 2016 to 2021. Natural language processing is used to group similar skills and job titles following the O*NET Online taxonomy. In addition to the descriptive statistics, the statistical significance test and correlation analysis are conducted. The analysis could identify high demand ICT job titles (Software Developers, Computer System Engineers/Architects, Web Developers, Project Management Specialists) and skills (API, Database, JavaScript) but Computer System Engineer/Architect job titles and API skills are increasing fast. The shift from networking to JavaScript and UI Design is also noteworthy after COVID-19. The preliminary curricula analysis suggests the responsiveness of the CSE program, but online job portal data analysis might provide opportunities for developing unique CSE specialization, courses and curricula.

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) led a pilot project for the introduction of a bus fare collection system through integrated circuit (IC) card in Bangladesh. The project resulted in not only improved efficiency through systemization and customer satisfaction, but also an unintentional rise in sales and a high evaluation from women. Based on these results, this paper discusses the necessity of an incentive mechanism for employees in addition to anti-corruption measures through systemization, both of which are factors in the success of the introduction of the IC transport card and increased accessibility to women.

Based on a survey of 525 papers published in three ICTD-related conferences during the ten-year period between 2006 and 2015, we find that there has been a general trend toward increasing geographical diversification of ICTD research sites. This manifests as an overall decline in both absolute number and proportion of papers reporting on studies in India -- which retained the top spot throughout the interval of this analysis -- as well as gains in other countries such as Kenya and Ghana. In addition, we find that the total number of countries represented in the literature has also increased, leading to what appears to be a geographically broadening range of ICTD research activity. We offer several hypotheses to explain this trend's underlying causes.