In a small market town in northern Bangladesh, Mehedi opens his shop before dawn, stacking shelves with seeds and crop protection products for the farmers who will arrive from the surrounding villages before the day grows hot. Five years ago he was a recent university graduate with a degree, ambition and no clear path forward. Today he serves more than 500 farmers across five villages.

He is, in the language of the programme that trained him, an agri-entrepreneur. To the farmers who rely on him he is something plainer: the person you call when a crop starts wilting. He does not only sell inputs — he diagnoses, advises and follows up.

Agriculture remains the backbone of Bangladesh's rural economy, employing nearly 40 percent of the country's workforce, and the millions of men and women who farm small plots across the delta have always lived between hope and precarity. Erratic rainfall, flooding, salinity intrusion and rising temperatures have made the farming calendar unreliable; a crop that once followed a familiar rhythm of seasons now faces conditions its growers were never trained for.

Without reliable guidance, many farmers turned to informal dealers. Women farmers felt the gap most sharply: with less access to public spaces, extension services and markets, they were often the last to hear new information and the first to carry the losses.

Better Life Farming is a last-mile initiative that brings together Bayer, Netafim, Yara and the International Finance Corporation — the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group — to meet the everyday needs of farming communities. In Bangladesh the model builds and professionalises a network of rural agri-entrepreneurs who run one-stop centres as frontline advisers and service providers.

The people who run them are neither government extension workers nor corporate agents. They are neighbours, trained and trusted, which is what makes the advice land. Where an extension officer may visit a village occasionally, the centre is open every day, in the same place, run by someone the farmer already knows.

For a country where youth unemployment weighs heavily and agriculture is often treated as the work people leave behind, the second result matters as much as the first. Mehedi found a steady livelihood, and evidence that farming can be a genuine career for young people willing to rethink what a job looks like.

Source: World Bank