Five ideas to turn PM’s Malaysia visit into a strategic reset in ties

When Prime Minister Tarique Rahman lands in Kuala Lumpur on June 21, the weight of this visit will be unmistakable. Choosing Malaysia as his first official overseas destination since assuming office underscores Dhaka’s deliberate choice of a neutral Southeast Asian partner over regional giants like India and China. It reciprocates Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s swift, supportive visit to Dhaka in late 2024 and signals a mutual desire to forge a modern, resilient alliance.

Yet, if the public and media discourse back home is any indication, the purpose of this trip is being viewed by many through a narrow lens: reopening the traditional, low-wage manpower sector and regularising undocumented workers.

While resolving migration bottlenecks is crucial, an obsession with the “labour supply” status quo risks reducing this milestone summit to ceremonial damage control. If Dhaka approaches Kuala Lumpur with the same old blueprints, it will miss a generational window of economic alignment. To truly honour this relationship, the prime minister should pitch a data-driven, strategic framework that moves Bangladesh away from servicing Malaysia’s low-wage sectors and inserts it directly into the high-value, high-wage segments of Malaysia’s rapidly expanding economy.

The structural stars are perfectly aligned for this shift. Both nations are sitting at a critical development threshold. By 2030, Malaysia is projected to transition into a high-income nation. Concurrently, Bangladesh is scheduled to graduate from Least Developed Country (LDC) status, if not sooner than later. Furthermore, Dhaka’s strategic master plan aims to massively increase the ICT and telecom sector’s contribution to national GDP from its current 1-2 percent up to 10 percent over the next five years, steering the country towards a trillion-dollar economy by 2034. In Bangladesh, Malaysia has an ambitious partner hungry for digital transformation. However, we need to deploy five bold, interconnected, and high-value ideas.

First, we must unlock post-study work rights for Bangladeshi students in Malaysia. Bangladeshi students currently constitute the second-largest group of foreign students in Malaysia. They are already acclimated, educated, and integrated into Malaysian society. By granting these graduates temporary post-study work rights, Malaysia can immediately tap into a pre-existing pool of skilled talent to fuel its growth. For Bangladesh, the long-term payoff is immense: these professionals can eventually return home with premium global corporate experience, ready to catalyse Bangladesh’s domestic industries and permanently fortify the Dhaka-Kuala Lumpur economic bridge.

Second, Bangladesh must target Malaysia’s high-tech industrial expansion. Malaysia is currently facing a critical structural deficit of roughly 60,000 skilled engineers required to meet surging industry demand driven by an influx of global tech investment. Meanwhile, Bangladesh boasts an army of surplus, tech-savvy engineering graduates. A bilateral preferential agreement explicitly designed to absorb, train, and retain Bangladeshi engineers in Malaysia’s industrial hubs would be an absolute win-win, satisfying Malaysia’s urgent industrial hunger while giving Bangladeshi professionals world-class exposure.

Third, beyond university graduates, this partnership should carve out a specialised pathway for Bangladesh’s polytechnic graduates within Malaysia’s expanding semiconductor sector. Specifically, Bangladeshi polytechnic graduates can be trained in advanced chip packaging and sent to Malaysia on probation. If an initial cohort of 300 trainees excels, they can become industry brand ambassadors at a modest promotional cost of about Tk 10 crores by the Bangladesh government. In the long run, according to the Bangladesh Semiconductor Industry Association (BSIA) leaders, this will produce a hefty return: if 30,000 skilled Bangladeshis work in Malaysia for 10 years based on semiconductor packaging, they will earn an estimated $10 billion (approximately Tk 18,000 crore). This model will allow many to eventually return home to develop Bangladesh’s own domestic semiconductor packaging industry.

Fourth, the two nations share a pressing ecological and economic challenge: the modernisation of agriculture. Both countries desperately need to transition towards precision and smart farming, and both face the dilemma of an ageing farming demographic. The shared solution lies in getting tech-literate youth back into agribusiness through coordinated Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) collaboration. By linking Bangladeshi TVET institutions with Malaysian expertise, we can train a new generation of Bangladeshi youths as precision farmers. They can provide high-skill agricultural labour in Malaysia, master the mechanics of smart agronomy, and return to rebuild Bangladesh’s agro-future.

Fifth, the visit offers an opportunity for institutional learning in higher education. As Bangladesh targets an ambitious leap in its education spending to 5 percent of GDP over the next five years, it must study Malaysia’s long legacy of high public spending on education and the Malaysian Higher Education Blueprint 2026–2035 (MHEB). This strategic blueprint successfully transformed Malaysia’s public universities into top-tier, globally ranked QS institutions. By collaborating directly with Malaysia’s academic leadership, Bangladesh can acquire the institutional framework needed to reform its own higher education sector and revive the lost regional glory of flagship institutions like Dhaka University.

However, these novel proposals will remain confined to paper if Dhaka repeats its mistakes. Many historical diplomatic initiatives—particularly during the recent interim rule—failed because they lacked policy champions and bureaucratic ownership. MoUs are too frequently reduced to ceremonial photoshoots, left to gather dust without rigorous follow-up.

To break this cycle, the PM must establish an institutionalised advisory council. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should look beyond traditional bureaucratic channels and leverage the sizeable, untapped pool of academics and intellectuals who possess deep public-sector and policy-level exposure in Malaysia. By binding independent academic expertise to state execution, Dhaka can ensure that high-value negotiations are backed by rigorous data and tracked with unyielding accountability. Bangladesh must show Kuala Lumpur that it is no longer just a source of raw, low-skilled labour, but a sophisticated partner ready to co-author Asia’s high-tech future.

 M Niaz Asadullah is professor of economics at Dhaka University and senior fellow at IDEAS in Malaysia. 

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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