Learning and Earning Development Project (LEDP) — Bangladesh's National Freelancing & IT Skills Training Programme

Launched on 12 December 2016 by the ICT Division, the Learning and Earning Development Project (LEDP) provides free, structured training in "professional outsourcing" skills — principally graphic design, digital marketing and web design/development — delivered through training centres reaching all upazilas (sub-districts) and districts of Bangladesh. It explicitly targets educated but unemployed youth, including people with disabilities, and has distributed laptops to trainees to remove equipment barriers (reported at roughly 13,000 in an early phase and 4,000 in a later one). A parallel track has delivered short two-day ICT-fundamentals training to 240,000 young women nationwide.

This is a talent-retention programme in substance, even though it works through skills training rather than visas: it aims to give Bangladeshi youth a way to earn foreign-currency income and build careers domestically through remote and freelance digital work, as an alternative to unemployment or labour migration abroad. Reported cumulative trainee totals vary meaningfully across sources and reporting periods — figures found range from roughly 53,000 to 77,000 youths trained across phases since 2016, most likely reflecting different phase cut-off dates rather than one static number. One independent outlet reported that of those trained, 32,234 were confirmed to be actively earning through freelancing platforms, implying a conversion-to-income rate in the range of roughly 40–60% depending on which total-trained figure is used as the denominator.

A widely circulated claim that LEDP-trained freelancers had generated "$5 billion" in combined income appears inconsistent with independently reported figures for Bangladesh's entire national freelance industry (reported elsewhere at roughly $500 million–$1 billion annually for the whole country), and is treated here as an unverifiable outlier rather than repeated as fact. The programme's own detailed impact-assessment report could not be retrieved directly for this review, so the figures above rely on Bangladeshi press coverage rather than the primary government evaluation document — a limitation worth flagging for anyone replicating this assessment.

Read the full analysis: https://ledp.ictd.gov.bd/new/