Author:Arju Afrin Kathy

Let me be upfront about something. Discussions on carbon footprints are, to many of us in the development sector, what quantum physics is to a fisherman in Teknaf; theoretically important, practically distant. We nod along in workshops, type “sustainable” in our concept notes, and quietly ask the office boy to photocopy 200 more sets just in case.

So, when our supervisor, Mr. Aminul Arifeen, returned from Manila in 2023, from an official conference in one of Southeast Asia’s most chaotically vibrant cities, he came back carrying not the usual conference gossip and jet lag stories, but a vision.

And it was not an entirely foreign idea either. UNDP, as an organization, has long carried an institutional commitment to reducing its environmental footprint, from procurement practices to event management. Printing less, wasting less, consuming less; these are not new conversations within the UN system. What was new, at least for us, was the ambition to take that institutional value and build an entire national conference around it. Not as a footnote in the concept note. Not as a bullet point under ‘green initiatives.’ But as the entire operating model of a three-day, 2,500-person national event. That was the leap!

Zero. Not fewer. Zero!

But Mr. Arifeen, as anyone who has worked with him will tell you, is not a man who lets a good idea die in a meeting room. Every alternate week, with the patience of someone teaching long division to a reluctant student, he would return to his dream. “What if we did a paperless event?” “Have we thought about the QR code idea?” “Manila did it. Why can’t we?”

2025: The Year We Stopped Saying “What If”

Bangladesh’s development sector has a beautiful phrase it recycles annually: turning vision into reality. It appears in log frames, annual reports, and valedictory speeches with almost poetic consistency. In 2025, we actually did it.

The occasion was the National Conference on Social Protection, the flagship convening of the Cabinet Division’s social protection programme, supported by the Australian Government and UNDP Bangladesh. For context: this was not a cozy 50-person workshop in a hotel conference room with decent Wi-Fi. This was:

• 3 days of proceedings
• Nearly 2,500 participants in attendance
• Tens of thousands watching the inauguration live on UNDP Bangladesh’s page
• 8 thematic sessions, tackling everything from shock-responsive safety nets to digital financial inclusion
• 22 research papers, 23 speakers, 10 session chairs, 8 moderators, 23 presenters, and 39 discussants

And behind all of it was a team that had not seen a calm afternoon in weeks or finished a cup of coffee while it was still warm. Name cards. Banners. Seating arrangements. Speaker confirmations. Ensuring reasonable accommodation. Reply-all emails. Anyone who has ever organized a large conference knows that the list never ends, it only grows. But this time, on top of everything there was one thing that kept us all quietly anxious, beyond the banners, beyond the emails, beyond the seating charts! Something we had never tried before. Something we had built the entire conference around. “A QR code.”

The QR Code That Changed Everything

To our best knowledge, the National Conference on Social Protection became the first 100% paperless conference of its kind in Bangladesh. Every material: the concept notes, session presentations, the question box, venue details, speaker profiles, was uploaded to a digital platform and made accessible through a single scan. For fifteen days leading up to the conference, everything revolved around one thing. Breakfast? QR code. Morning meeting? QR code. Last thought before sleeping? You guessed it, of course, QR code. Life, quite literally, had become QR locked. Getting there, of course, was not without its drama!

First: the eternal question of which platform? Personal drive? Google Drive? A Dropbox link that half the participants would be unable to open on a personal device? After debates, SWOT analyses, and a very honest study of our audience; policymakers, bureaucrats, researchers, persons with disabilities, and a fair number of people for whom the internet is still a place you visit, not live in; the decision was made. The programme’s official website, maintained under the Cabinet Division, would be the host. And with that decision came a quiet, unspoken understanding: many participants would struggle, and we would be a call away. Every single time!

Then came the materials. Or rather, wait for the materials. If you have ever organized a conference in South Asia, you will recognize this particular form of suffering: the presenter who confirms their slide deck will arrive “tomorrow” for eleven consecutive days. Our team, inspired by Mr. Arifeen’s vision, drafted an email template and held the line: “Please, since we are aiming to do a Paperless Conference, for easy proceedings of the materials we need your PPT beforehand.” To those presenters who received this email seven times, we apologize, truly. To those who still managed to send their slides five minutes before stepping on stage; we will definitely have something creative planned for next year. 

The WhatsApp Moderator: Innovation, Necessity, or Both?

Perhaps the most creatively pragmatic moment of the entire conference was the Q&A segment.

We had committed to keeping question submissions entirely digital. No paper slips. No microphones being passed around the room. No disrupting a tight, packed session just to get a question to the podium. Everything through the platform. Everything through the QR code. Excellent in theory. The challenge: connecting a session moderator sitting on stage; someone who may not have grown up with a smartphone in hand, to a live stream of audience questions coming through an online platform, in real time, without confusion, delay, or the moderator accidentally going live on their personal Facebook!

The solution? WhatsApp.

Yes. The very same application your relatives use to send good morning messages and forward health tips of questionable accuracy. We simply had a team member relay incoming questions from the platform to me, I checked them, compiled them, and sent them straight to the moderator’s WhatsApp in real time. No complicated integrations. No new apps to download. Just a blue tick and a working mobile network. No complicated integrations. No new apps to download. No training sessions. Just a blue tick and a functioning mobile network. And that is when we realized, sometimes, the most elegant solution is the most obvious one.

What We Contributed Beyond the Room

After the conference concluded, something quiet but meaningful began to happen. Gradually, we started noticing; some government bodies, a few UN agencies, some NGOs and CSOs, one by one, beginning to conduct their own paperless events. And more than a few of them, to their credit, openly acknowledged that the National Conference on Social Protection had been their reference point. Their model. Proof that it was doable. And honestly, that meant more to us than any formal recognition could. And that, perhaps, is how meaningful change travels in Bangladesh’s development sector. Not through mandates. Not through grand launches. But through one small, replicable example that others choose to follow.

The Cost We Chose Not to Pay

Now, let us add a sliver of technical perspective, because this is where it gets satisfying. I will be honest: I am not an environmental scientist, and carbon accounting is not my area of expertise. But I can read references, and what they say is hard to ignore.

Had we printed materials for 2,500 participants across three days; concept notes, event schedule, session handouts, research paper and summaries, speaker profiles, question and photo consent forms; we would have been looking at a minimum of 25,000 to 30,000 pages of paper. A conservative estimate! 

Here is what that means in real terms. According to the Environmental Paper Network, producing one tonne of paper generates approximately 1.8 to 2.0 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) equivalent. A single A4 sheet weighs roughly 5 grams, which means 30,000 pages amounts to around 150 kilograms of paper or roughly 0.15 tonnes. That translates, by their estimates, to approximately 270 to 300 kilograms of CO2 emissions and that is just from paper production alone. Add printing energy, ink cartridges, transportation of materials, and eventual disposal, and the number climbs further.

To put it in language even I can understand: by going paperless, we avoided the equivalent carbon footprint of driving a car for nearly 1,500 kilometres. The precise calculation, I will leave to the experts. But even a rough number tells a clear story; every page we did not print was a small, quiet vote for the planet. And across 2,500 participants and three days, those votes added up. On behalf of all of us, and the planet we share!

Credits, Where They Are Genuinely Due

No vision survives contact with reality without the right people. The paperless conference was made possible by: Aminul Arifeen, the visioner who carried a dream home from Manila and refused, politely but persistently, to let it go.

Mohammad Mahfuzul Bari who managed the entire hosting platform with a calm that frankly made the rest of us question our own stress levels. Whether the platform was loading, lagging, or being accessed by hundreds of people simultaneously, he remained the kind of person who makes you believe everything is under control. Even when it possibly was not!   

S. M. Siam who figured out the deceptively complex question of how exactly do you put a QR code on a conference table so that it is visible, scannable, and not immediately mistaken for decoration?

Shantanu Chanda and Md. Nipun Afridi who managed the live question documentation online, keeping the digital dialogue flowing across three days of sessions.

Sadia Afrin Suvra and Takia Islam Toma who went table by table, QR code by QR code, verifying that every single scan led to exactly the right place. The unsung quality control of the entire operation.

Raiqah Ripa Walie Khan, Md. Naem Bhuyan, Shahida Parvin, and Mirza Nayeem Mahmud; running from pillar to post across the conference floor, explaining the know-how to participants and troubleshooting everything that needed fixing, without ever looking like they had given up.

A Final Note

Ten years from now, when Bangladesh’s development sector sits down to count the small but meaningful steps it took towards sustainability, I believe this will be one of the stories worth telling. Not because it was grand. But because it was replicable. Because it started with one man’s dream in Manila, survived almost two years of polite scepticism across weekly catch-up meetings, and became a model that others chose to follow.

We fulfilled a vision. Of a paperless conference!

And somewhere, a tree that did not have to become paper is still standing. And we are proud of that!