Thanks to $25,000 in seed cash from two Tufts competitions, Farah Momen, F20, is piloting a task this summertime to resource Bangladeshi girls who paintings within the garment industry. Her challenge, referred to as The Now Exchange, will provide unfastened contraceptives at a Dhaka manufacturing facility because of the first step toward improving women’s fitness there.
Momen and Giulia Bova, a chum from her undergraduate years at McGill University, received the Fletcher D-Prize Poverty Venture Solution Competition in March. The accolade came with $10,000 to pilot the program this summer season. In April, the 2 ladies additionally received the first area within the social effect music of the Tufts $100K New Ventures Competition via the Gordon Institute, which gave them an extra $15,000. Both prizes also provide in-kind support.
The D-Prize has strict criteria focusing on the “D,” which stands for “distribution” and emphasizes the need to unfold modern ideas extensively, stated Marilyn Davison, entrepreneurial instruct in residence at The Fletcher School, who mentored Momen thru the opposition. “Farah’s thought continually turned into very robust on enjoyable that standards,” Davison said. “She and her accomplice Giulia also have very sturdy on-the-ground expertise and experience, each in Bangladesh and inside the field of own family-making plans tasks.”
Momen and Bova intend to begin their project this summertime by providing loose injections of Sayana Press, a hormonal contraceptive, through an already present in-factory health sanatorium. Over time, they plan to extend to extra clinics and different elements of women’s fitness, along with menstrual hygiene and home violence education. Their goal is to have the services funded using worldwide groups that promote clothes made in Bangladesh. “Retailers may be held accountable for the properly-being of workers through their deliver chain,” Momen said. “They’re those that have the ability to, in reality, do it.”
Momen, Bangladeshi-American, traces her thought for this agency to her past due uncle, who owned a garment factory and generously invested in his community. Women regularly make up 80 percent of the staff in such factories, so the legally required on-website clinics provide a terrific street to attain them, she stated. “Because women are operating such lengthy hours, they’re no longer always going to headstand in line” at an overcrowded public clinic after work, she said.
Momen advanced some of the strategies for The Now Exchange in a Fletcher magnificence, Managing NGOs and Social Enterprises, with Professor Alnoor Ebrahim. The route was demanding students determine what they could do nicely and how to scale it to make a bigger effect. “This forces a group to get some clarity on what they need to acquire and how they’re going to do it and how they’re going to preserve their toes to the fire for it,” Ebrahim said.
This summer season, Momen and Bova, who is incomes a master’s diploma in global improvement policy at the Korbel School of the University of Denver, will paintings at the undertaking in Bangladesh. They will identify a pilot manufacturing facility, lease a business development director and fitness trainers, and train fitness care people to administer the contraceptive and deal with broader issues of women’s fitness. Next 12 months, they hope to feature or 3 greater factories, every with about 300 workers. Ebrahim, for one, is assured about The Now Exchange’s prospects. “Farah and her group have been evident and systematic in questioning this thru,” he stated. “I’m optimistic, each due to their clean questioning and because Farah is rather motivated.”
GETTING THEIR START IN BUSINESS
Fletcher students excel in entrepreneurial contests because they are “thoroughly-traveled and they may be keenly aware of the granularity of the lives human beings live in distinctive elements of the sector, of the bottlenecks on the ground, from time to time logistical, occasionally cultural, and every so often political,” stated Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Fletcher and govt director of the faculty’s Institute for Business inside the Global Context. Student begin-up companies “faucet into the insights college students have based totally on beyond reviews and past travels to clear up complex troubles.” Beyond The Now Exchange, right here are three Fletcher student initiatives that received awards this spring.
