With the establishment of over 9394 Digital Centres countrywide, the average distance that rural citizens need to travel to access government services has come down to a walking distance, approximately 4 km.

Digital Centres are one-stop shops that ensure that the underserved, such as women living in remote rural areas, people with disabilities and the elderly, regardless of their literacy and ICT knowledge, can access vital services. Each Digital Centre is located in a government office at the village level but run by two citizen entrepreneurs – one male and one female, to cater to the needs of women in conservative rural Bangladesh. They are not formally appointed as government employees and do not receive salaries or compensation in any form from the government.

16,800 Digital Centre Entrepreneurs, over 5,300 of whom are women, charge money for the provision of popular private services which cross subsidizes the free of cost provision of government services.

These one-stop shops thus represent a novel public-private partnership between public agencies, private sector companies and the Digital Centre Entrepreneurs – effectively establishing a microenterprise in grassroots level government offices – that allow the amalgamation of over 387 public and private services.