My Story

Intro

In Bangladesh more then 70% rural farmers are illiterate and about 98% do not know any international language (like English). Beside that they have no access to ICT for fostering their entrepreneurship with better technology adaptation, building market channel and communication linkage. Inaccessibility to ICT and modern technology due to language and technical limitations are making them further marginalized - but Faisal is changing this situation.

About Me

I was born in 1979 in Bangladesh. After studying engineering, I started to work as a volunteer in social development organizations in 1999. I want to bring an institutional shape of indigenous knowledge, especially on agriculture. I also plan to establish an university for indigenous knowledge promotion.

Being a progressive dedicated youth my passion is always insisting me to contribute to social transformation. Moved by the sorrows and distress of the poor and socio-economic discrimination in respect of class, cast, creed and gender, I formed  an organization called Padma, signifying the name of most important river in Bangladesh. 

I found that agriculture and agro-entrepreneurship should be the focus of the organization because the agricultural sector is the largest and most critical economic sector in Bangladesh. More than 70% of the population lives in rural areas and is economically dependent on the performance of agricultural production. Although agriculture has largest contribution to our national economy, the lives and livelihood of the farmers and agro-entrepreneurs are still in marginal status. This inspired me to become a social entrepreneur, to gain more social benefits than economic return.

My Venture

The Padma Research and Development Organization is a youth-led organization initiating "institutionalization of agriculture knowledge management system for rural farming community". Our goal is to build up an institutional process for scaling up agro-entrepreneurs.

The rural entrepreneurs in Bangladesh have not yet adopted modern technical and communicational advantage to gear up their entrepreneurship. So there is the opportunity for an intermediary technical hand (educated youth of farming community) to bring them from a basic knowledge level to an advanced communication and technology user.  We call this innovative approach “Knowledge broking”

We focus on three vital components:

1) Re-directional information flow. This includes providing farmers with appropriate information about farming methods, crop selection and better technology to solve the problems of local farmers; 2) Implementing a local management system for crop security, including security of marketing and the guarantee of a good prize for their products & b) security of timely & sufficient input supply such as credit, fertilizer, seeds, fuel; 3) Implementing an institutional model of multi stakeholders participation for agri-entrepreneurs and capacity building of youth entrepreneurs as knowledge broker.