South Asia’s Regional Trade Puzzle: The SAARC Promise and The Path Forward

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In this Good to Great Podcast episode, hosts Samanata Thapa and Masrur Rahman sit down with Md. Shamsul Haque, former Director General of the SAARC Wing and Additional Foreign Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh, and current CEO of Coders Trust Bangladesh, to answer a question that should be keeping every South Asian policymaker and business leader up at night: why does a region with one of the youngest workforces on the planet, a manufacturing base of enormous scale, and consumer demand that global brands are racing to tap into trade more with countries thousands of miles away than with its own neighbors? Intra-regional trade sits at a mere five percent while ASEAN has crossed twenty-five percent and the EU operates near sixty. Something is broken, and it has been broken for nearly four decades. Mr. Haque takes listeners inside the rooms where regional decisions were made, revealing how a consensus-based system became a consensus-based gridlock, why high-level summits have been frozen for over a decade, and what political fault lines continue to block progress. The conversation also pushes forward, exploring how the SAARC Development Fund could transform the region's unskilled workforce into a digitally competitive talent pool, what a South Asian Economic Union would actually require, and why Bangladesh may hold the key to restarting the entire process. Whether you are a policymaker, trade professional, entrepreneur, or simply someone who believes South Asia deserves better, this episode will change how you think about the region's future.