Better Life Farming centres bring farm advice to villages around Saidpur, Bangladesh

In a feature published on 6 July 2026, the World Bank described Mehedi, a young man who runs a Better Life Center in Saidpur, a market town in Nilphamari district in northern Bangladesh. He opens before dawn, stacking shelves with seeds and crop protection products for the farmers who come in from the surrounding villages before the day grows hot. Five years earlier he had been a recent university graduate with no clear path; by mid-2026 he served more than 500 farmers across five villages, and did more than sell inputs: he diagnosed problems, advised and followed up.

Saidpur is an upazila of Nilphamari district in Rangpur Division, known for Saidpur Airport and its railway workshop.

According to the World Bank, agriculture employs nearly 40 percent of Bangladesh's workforce but its productivity remains stubbornly low. Smallholders face several obstacles at once: limited access to quality inputs, fragmented advice, volatile markets and a farming calendar made unreliable by erratic rainfall, flooding, salinity and rising temperatures. Without reliable guidance, many turned to informal dealers.

Women farmers felt the gap most sharply, the feature said, because they have less access to extension services, markets and public spaces. In villages where women have limited access to public gatherings, the centres became a legitimate reason to meet, share experience and learn alongside peers.

Better Life Farming is a last-mile initiative that brings together Bayer, Netafim, Yara and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group. Trained local agri-entrepreneurs run one-stop centres offering quality inputs, climate-smart advice, digital tools and market links. They are neither government extension workers nor corporate agents but neighbours the farmers already know, and the centre is open every day.

The model reached Bangladesh in late 2020. The Business Standard reported that Bayer CropScience and ACI Bangladesh signed an agreement on 24 November 2020, with a first phase of 56 Better Life Farming Centers planned across the country to enlist 16,800 farmers. Virginia Tech's 2023 GAP Report said that by June 2023 the initiative had reached more than 1 million smallholders through over 2,500 centres in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mexico, Honduras and Tanzania.

In the World Bank feature, Rahima, who farms in a village near Saidpur, said that after the agri-entrepreneurs showed her a better way to irrigate, her harvest rose from 10 maund to 20, the maund being a local unit of about 37 kg. Another farmer, Torikul, said his income had nearly doubled, from around 30,000 to 40,000 taka to 60,000 to 70,000 taka. At the market level the entrepreneurs had begun to aggregate produce, so that small harvests could be sold in volumes that attract better buyers and prices.

Razzak, an agri-consultant with the initiative who recruits new entrepreneurs, told the World Bank that job scarcity is a real problem in the area, with educated young graduates sitting idle not for lack of ambition but for lack of opportunity. In a country where farming is often seen as work people leave behind, entrepreneurs like Mehedi were choosing it as a career.

The World Bank said Better Life Farming Bangladesh aims to empower over 1,000 agri-entrepreneurs, at least 20 percent of them women, who will directly serve more than 250,000 farmers. It builds on the World Bank-supported PARTNER programme, for which Bangladesh signed $500 million of World Bank financing on 7 June 2023 to promote crop diversification, food safety, climate resilience, entrepreneurship and digital agricultural services. It also aligns with the World Bank Group's AgriConnect, which targets 300 million smallholder farmers worldwide.

Photo: Balaram Mahalder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources: World Bank, World Bank (press release of 7 June 2023), The Business Standard, Virginia Tech GAP Report 2023, Wikipedia