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After a lengthy professional tenure with the World Bank’s Result Measurement Unit, I began to question why development aid to impoverished countries appears to benefit aid facilitators and donors, as well as a few wealthy clients, rather than empowering aid recipients on the ground. My interdisciplinary research project focuses on the poverty reduction industry in Bangladesh’s private and public sectors, where the industry is deeply embedded in the country’s culture and class structures. I analyze development through an examination of those class relations and how they are situated vis-à-vis the politics of development and economic globalization, and how they shape aid delivery mechanisms and aid recipients’ choices in participating in such programs. I begin by illustrating Bangladesh’s complex historical, economic, and political environment. This background information is important to understand the current trajectory of development in Bangladesh. Particularly, I look at how the country’s long and turbulent history of state-building continues to shape class configurations and privatization processes facilitated by the development aid industry. My interdisciplinary research has a fieldwork component, in which I employ a multi-sited approach to data collection through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation in rural and urban Bangladesh to allow the aid recipients and other members of different social groups to share different aspects of development aid. One of my main findings is that development in Bangladesh relies on dual hegemony, which I articulate as an alliance between the new Bangladeshi political and economic elite and the Western international aid/development industry. I argue that dual hegemony functions in such a way that it erodes the Bangladeshi middle-class and reinforces class and caste differences through the privatization of the public sector and greater fragmentation of civil society. In my conclusions I highlight the need to build a strong middle-class. This can be achieved by improving the industrial base and growing the skilled workforce, as well as by reducing the dependency on imported raw materials. Furthermore, it is critical to educate Bangladeshis about the primary reasons for poverty construction and underdevelopment, as well as to explore alternatives in development that can strengthen opportunities for young Bangladeshis to grow the economy.