Image: © H M Shahidul Islam | iStock

The traditional development playbook is failing. For decades, multilateral institutions have assumed that growth follows a fixed formula: factories, export zones, rising tax revenues, and balanced fiscal accounts. This prescription has been applied across the Global South with remarkable consistency, yet unremarkable success.

Kenya is the clearest recent illustration. In 2024, Gen Z protesters effectively toppled an austerity-laden finance bill designed to satisfy IMF conditions. Those young people were rejecting economic policies designed in foreign offices for a world their country no longer resembles.

The real new engines of development in Asia and Africa today are not found in special economic zones or export quotas. They are found in culture, gaming, music, design, digital services, remote IT work, and creative production.

Nigeria’s film and music industry alone employs 4.2 million people. Creative industries support 7.5% of jobs in the Philippines. India’s e-sports market is valued at $107 million. According to UNCTAD, the creative economy contributes up to 7.3% of GDP in developing economies and employs up to 12.5% of the workforce. Yet these sectors remain largely invisible in standard growth models.

The creative economy is not just creating jobs and therefore tax revenue. It is also the source of influence. As stated by the State Minister of Foreign Affairs Shama Obaed in Bangladesh’s parliament recently, the creative economy is crucial for creating international contacts and for furnishing Bangladesh’s image abroad. While hard to capture in a growth model, the economic benefits of such soft power should not be underestimated.

In my home country of Bangladesh, the creative economy is booming. Creative economy growth and deregulation have been explicitly identified as drivers of economic revival and championed by Finance Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury.

Now, Bangladesh is building cultural infrastructure at scale. New theatres are being planned across the country, freelancer-friendly financial reforms are being introduced to make it easier for digital workers to receive international payments, and the government is actively working to bring global payment platforms, including PayPal, into the Bangladeshi market.

These reforms are central to Bangladesh’s post-LDC graduation growth strategy. In Bangladesh, we are banking on human creativity as being our next major growth driver.

The digital and creative economies have one defining advantage: accessibility. With a smartphone, internet access, and an idea, a young entrepreneur in Dhaka or Lagos can, in principle, access global markets. Talent is not the barrier. It is the clunky machinery of bureaucracy. A young entrepreneur trying to open a business account faces a wall of complicated, manual paperwork. A rural artisan with export potential gets stuck in customs. A skilled digital worker cannot access an international payment system because they cannot verify a business online. Every unnecessary permission, every physical signature, every official who ‘must approve’ something adds friction to the most dynamic corners of growing economies.

My home country of Bangladesh was famously described as a ‘basket case nation’ in 1971. Life expectancy has increased by 26 years since that phrase was uttered. The garment sector is part of that story, but so is a deliberate programme of digitisation of public services. Land registration, utility payments, and social protection enrolment have all moved online. When over two-thirds of the population live in rural areas, removing the need to travel and queue for paperwork has had a material impact on millions of lives, not to mention the boosted tax revenue.

Bangladesh today provides 15% of the world’s freelance digital workforce. That base proved its resilience during COVID-19, when supply chain-dependent industries collapsed, and digital workers continued operating.

It is proving its resilience again now, as the Iranian energy shock drives up commodity prices and exposes the vulnerability of export models tied to global freight and fossil fuel costs. Digital work is structurally insulated from precisely the kind of geopolitical disruptions that are repricing physical supply chains.

Gender-targeted reform has been equally important. Female labour force participation in Bangladesh has more than doubled since the 1990s. In March 2026, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman took this further with the formal launch of the Family Card programme, issuing digital smart cards directly to female heads of household and providing monthly cash transfers of Tk 2,500 via direct digital payments to mobile wallets or bank accounts.

The evidence base is clear here. When women are given financial agency, they invest disproportionately in family health and education, generating income-producing activity that ripples through local economies. The programme, now in pilot across 14 upazilas with 37,567 beneficiaries, is designed to reach 40 million households over time. It is also crucially delivered digitally, reducing the scope for the extraction and corruption that physical cash distribution has historically enabled.

Bangladesh is also approaching a significant threshold: scheduled graduation from the UN’s Least Developed Country category in November 2026. This transition, whenever it takes place, will see preferential trade treatment fall away. It makes the case for economic diversification beyond garments more urgent than ever. The creative economy framework being developed under Finance Minister Amir Khosru’s leadership is, in this context, precisely the kind of structural pivot that Bangladesh needs.

Bangladesh is not alone. Estonia, emerging as a newly independent state in 1991 with a tiny population and few natural resources, made the strategic decision to treat internet access as essential public infrastructure. Today it has ten unicorns, the highest per capita in Europe. The pattern is consistent: countries that invest in digital infrastructure and streamline bureaucratic processes generate entrepreneurial activity and therefore tax revenue.

Multilateral financing from regional development banks should prioritise investment in digital infrastructure. Developing countries should digitise public service delivery as a matter of priority, removing physical touchpoints that create friction and corruption risk alike. Digital entrepreneurship visas, early digital education, and dedicated infrastructure for freelance support should become standard components of national development strategies.

Deregulation, in this context, does not mean removing protections. It means taking a scalpel, not a chainsaw, to the specific regulations that obstruct economic participation. In developing nations, deregulating business registration, banking access, customs processes, and online payment verification reduces corruption, not the other way around.

Finally, institutions like the IMF play an important role. They also have an opportunity to evolve. Existing frameworks for credit rating and risk assessment were built for a different era of development, one defined by physical industry and commodity exports.

Models with measures of digital and creative economy activity would make them more accurate, not less rigorous. The most resilient, accessible, and fastest-growing sectors in many developing economies remain underrepresented in standard assessments. Updating that picture would make models like the IMF’s more accurate, and their lending conditions more precisely calibrated to the realities on the ground.

Today’s energy shocks, supply chain fragility, and accelerating AI adoption should act as a tailwind for the growth of the digital economy in developing nations. The countries best positioned to weather this turbulence are those that have reduced their dependence on commodity exports and fossil fuel logistics, and invested instead in the human capital and digital infrastructure that allow their citizens to participate in the global economy from wherever they happen to be.

Development, in this decade, will not be driven by factories. It will be driven by the freelancer in Dhaka with a laptop and a broadband connection, by the musician in Lagos with a streaming account, and by the artisan in Manila who can sell directly to a buyer in London.

The creative spark is driving development in 2026. The streamlining of regulation can turn that spark into a flame.