The Agri-Entrepreneur Next Door - A global farming initiative is redefining jobs and harvests in rural Bangladesh

It is early morning in a small market town in northern Bangladesh, and Mehedi is already at his shop. He opened the doors of his Better Life Center in Saidpur before dawn, stacking shelves with seeds and crop protection products, as he readies himself for the stream of farmers who will come in from surrounding villages before the day grows hot. His young daughter sometimes stops by after school, threading through the rows of inputs to find her father behind the counter, and lately, her grandfather too, who now helps manage a space the family has built on its own land. Five years ago, Mehedi was a recent university graduate in a country where youth unemployment weighs heavily on young shoulders. He had a degree and ambition, but no clear path forward. That struggle was far from his alone — for many educated young graduates, ambition is plentiful, but jobs are not. Then a Better Life Farming agri-consultant came to his community, looking not for established shopkeepers, but for people like Mehedi: curious, trusted by neighbors, open to learning. Today, Mehedi serves over 500 farmers across five villages. He does more than sell agricultural solutions—he diagnoses, advises, and follows up. He is, in the language of the program, an agri-entrepreneur. But to the farmers who rely on him, he is something simpler and more essential: the person you call when your crop starts wilting and you don't know why. In stepping into that role, Mehedi also found something else: a steady livelihood, and proof that agriculture can be a genuine career path for young people willing to reimagine what a job can look like. A System That Wasn’t Working Bangladesh's smallholder farmers, the millions of men and women who cultivate small plots across the delta, have always lived at the intersection of hope and precarity. Agriculture remains the backbone of the country's rural economy, employing nearly 40 percent of the total workforce of the country. Yet productivity has remained stubbornly low, held in place by a knot of interconnected challenges: limited access to quality inputs, fragmented advice, volatile markets, and, increasingly, the disrupting hand of weather shocks. Erratic rainfall, flooding, salinity intrusion, and rising temperatures have turned farming calendars unreliable. A crop that thrived on a familiar rhythm of seasons now faces conditions its growers were not trained for. Without access to reliable guidance, many farmers turned to informal dealers, purchasing low-quality inputs that increased costs without improving outcomes. The result was a vicious cycle: low productivity, low income, low investment, and greater vulnerability to the next shock. Women farmers faced these pressures acutely. With less access to public spaces, extension services, and markets, they were often the last to receive new information and the first to bear the losses. A Different Kind of Partnership Better Life Farming is a last-mile initiative bringing together global partners including Bayer, Netafim, Yara, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, to address the everyday needs of rural farming communities worldwide. This initiative is built on a simple premise: smallholder farmers are not the problem to be solved, but entrepreneurs to be supported. Rather than treating farmers as passive beneficiaries, Better Life Farming delivers integrated solutions such as quality inputs, climate-smart agronomic advice, digital tools, and market linkages through locally anchored service hubs that operate as trusted, commercially viable rural businesses. In Bangladesh, the model centers on building and professionalizing a network of rural agri-entrepreneurs who manage Better Life Farming one-stop centers as frontline advisors and service providers. These are neither government extension workers nor corporate agents. They are neighbors, trained and trusted to serve their communities with both technical knowledge and genuine accountability. The Bangladesh initiative also builds on the World Bank–supported PARTNER project (Program on Agricultural and Rural Transformation for Nutrition, Entrepreneurship, and Resilience), which strengthened public agricultural systems and service delivery at scale and formalized collaboration between Bayer CropScience Ltd. Bangladesh and the Department of Agricultural Extension. Building on this, Better Life Farming provides a market-based pathway to sustain and scale public investment by integrating eligible PARTNER-trained entrepreneurs into commercially viable Better Life Farming centers. In this, Bangladesh is embracing AgriConnect: a World Bank Group initiative that aims to support 300 million smallholder farmers move up the value chain globally, creating jobs, strengthening food security, and demonstrating that productivity and resilience can scale through private sector leadership. Finding the Mehedis One of the distinctive features of Better Life Farming Bangladesh is the deliberate search for untapped human potential in rural communities, particularly among young people for whom agriculture, while long a mainstay of the economy, has not been seen as a viable future. "Job scarcity is a real problem here. Educated young men, graduates, are sitting idle. Not because they lack ambition, but because opportunity is hard to find. So, we open a door. We bring them in for trial sessions on modern agri-techniques, no pressure, just a look at what's possible. Not everyone comes back, but many do. Enough to surprise you. And from those who stay, we find our next agri-entrepreneur," says Razzak, a Better Life Farming agri-consultant. The training agri-entrepreneurs receive through Better Life Farming—drawing on methodologies from IFC's Agribusiness Leadership Program—covers not only agronomy but also business management, digital tools, advisory service models, and risk frameworks. The goal is not to create short-term intermediaries but a generation of professional rural service providers capable of growing with their communities. Better Life Farming Bangladesh aims to empower over 1,000 agri-entrepreneurs, with at least 20% women—more than double the current share. In turn, these agri-entrepreneurs will directly serve over 250,000 farmers across the country, acting as the human infrastructure of a new agricultural ecosystem.