Ensuring Educational Equity
What motivated you to initiate Teach for Bangladesh?
I was born in United States, but I grew up back and forth between Bangladesh and the U.S. I was born to a family that was able to give me all the opportunities in the world. I had the advantage of an excellent education whether I was in the U.S. or in Bangladesh. I realised from a very early age that the opportunities i was getting and the education and the upbringing I was getting was simply not accessible, or a reality for the vast majority of children in Bangladesh.
I’ll give you a small example. When we were in school we went to a private english medium school in Dhaka, but then we also did lots of things outside school – I went to Katthak class, Gaaner class, we learned how to use computers, we did swimming class. There were a lot of extracurricular activities in addition to a rigorous education, but just coming and going to school we saw so many children who are not in school. That disparity is so glaring when you are growing up in Bangladesh. I had a sense since I was young that I grew up with a lot of privilege, and with that privilege there was some kind of responsibility to pay it forward, even though I am Bangladeshi-American, my Bangladeshi heritage was very important to me, and I always knew that I wanted to live and work in Bangladesh and contribute in some way. I just didn’t know what form that would take.
The other thing I was really aware of growing up in Bangladesh is that many of my peers aspired to leave the country. Many of my peers aspired to work in the corporate sector, but I noticed very few people aspired to stay in Bangladesh long term and work in the social space. It occured to me at an early age that there is so much talent in Bangladesh, but if there was a way to harness it towards developing the country and making it a better more inclusive space, that there was potential there.
Fast forward when I was graduating from university, I was approached by a recruiter to work for a program called Teach For America, through which I became a teacher in Inner City Washington D.C. I come from a family of educators, my grandfather was a professor at Dhaka University. My great grandfather was the Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University, so I come from a family of academics, but I myself have never considered teaching before except for through Teach for America – that’s when I got really excited about it and I became a teacher in DC, and I experienced that there were many disparities in the U.S. as well when it comes to education. I kept remembering my upbringing in Bangladesh, the disparities that existed. What was amazing about Teach For America was that it was recruiting the best and the brightest young Americans – people coming out of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Wesley, all of these top schools, and all these people were competing in thousands to become teachers in some of the most low-income schools where they were serving pretty disadvantaged communities across the U.S.
I began thinking from then on if this would be possible in Bangladesh, will there be an application in Bangladesh. When I finished Teach For America, I came to live in Bangladesh for a little while, and decided to reconnect and understand the situation and state of the country. I started spending time in schools with children, and I realized that the gap still existed and that there was this huge opportunity for young people to do something about it and get involved. That’s how I decided to start Teach For Bangladesh.
According to you what sort of skills will be integral to propel the inclusion of women in the entrepreneurship scenario of Bangladesh?
I think it’s the same skills that would be integral for the inclusion of men or anyone really in entrepreneurship. I think in order to succeed as an entrepreneur, the biggest thing is not a skill, but an orientation, a mindset which is around perseverance, grit, staying with it and seeing it through. If you have perseverance and tenacity, it’s possible to do anything in Bangladesh and do many things as an entrepreneur.
Particularly when we think about women, culturally both in Bangladesh and globally women aren’t encouraged to be risk takers. We are encouraged to be timid, law-abiding, achieve good grades and stay within the lines. This is counterintuitive to the spirit of entrepreneurship. The society, educational institutions can start encouraging and normalizing risk taking, normalize making mistakes, failing, getting dirty, getting messy. When we build a culture of risk taking, of making mistakes, of getting dirty and messy, I think those are some of the things that are fundamental to entrepreneurship
What were the challenges of initiating an education centric start up?
Some of the big challenges are funding, and finding and retaining the right talent, and establishing a culture within the organization where everyone can be their best and attracting the right funding and resources it takes to build something from scratch. Those are challenges for an startup. I think the particular nuances for women leaders is that in some cases young women are not taken seriously or are underrated, both in terms of people you want to work with and fund, but also in terms of as a leader women have to strike a delicate balance between being assertive and confident and also being nice and likeable and kind, which i think is a balance men don’t necessarily have to worry about.
The problem that we are trying to address at Teach For Bangladesh is educational equity. We see this as a systemic problem which has a multitude of causes and many solutions in result of it. We want to repair the system itself so that all children can benefit from. Our approach to solving the systemic challenge is to address the leadership capacity of our nation, and what we are trying to do is really build a movement of young people, of young leaders who are bold, courageous, vision driven, values-oriented who believe in equitable, a tolerant and a progressive Bangladesh. We find young people who believe in that vision of a just and inclusive and prosperous country, and we develop their leadership and their exposure to education and the challenges of education and equity to help them become those long term leaders. We recruit graduates, and young professionals, and they spend two years in our flagship program which we call the Teach For Bangladesh Fellowship where they work as a teacher in underserved school or communities and during that time they receive rigorous training and professional development from TFB which helps them become set up for long term leadership across the system.
Usually tech-based startups are eagerly invested in. How did investors respond to Teach for Bangladesh?
It’s a little different from tech-based investments. Number one we are not seeking investors who are going to receive a profit, so there is an additional challenge there, where people who are supporting us are extending their support because they believe in our mission, and they believe in the dividends that are social, not necessarily financial. You need to find people who are aligned with that, people who want to see the social dividend. It’s not just charity, people have to realize that Bangladesh’s future is my future, the future of education in this country is deeply linked to the success of your business, the safety of the environment you live in, the richness of the dialogue, the political space, they are all interlinked with the success of education. It’s about finding people for whom these values and messages resonate. But when you find them, it’s very rewarding because those are people who want to go above and beyond to support the initiatives.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of Teach for Bangladesh?
So many. The biggest reward is two fold. One is seeing the changes and the magic that happens in the classroom when there are teachers who’ve really gotten their children excited and passionate about learning. I was in a classroom where students were learning about grammar, about parts of speech, which is kind of a dry subject. But these children were so excited to talk about whether seeing is a noun or a verb. One says seeing is sight, so it must a noun, while another says but seeing something is an action, therefore, it must be a verb. It was an interesting philosophical debate among 12 year olds, so seeing when children are not afraid to ask those questions, and they are really engaging in curiosity and intellectual pursuit is really exciting and energizing for me.
Of course seeing some of the changes in the people who participate in our program, the fellows who enter the program and how they change from when they first come in to when they finish the two years. They leave often times more confident, much more passionate, they are clear about what they want to do in their lives, they are clear about their values. They have had these relationships in the classrooms that have really changed their perspectives. Seeing that shift in them is very encouraging, and it makes me the most hopeful about Bangladesh.
When we started Teach For Bangladesh, many people doubted that a graduate from a top university would not spend two full years working full time as a teacher in an underprivileged school. It’s really uncommon and unheard of for fresh graduates to forgo the opportunity to work for an MNC or banks, and instead opt for a 6-day teaching job putting in 50-60 hours a week in an urban-poor community in a school that does not have proper infrastructure sometimes, or the electricity is out, teaching 80-90 children.
A lot of people said this was not possible in Bangladesh because Bangladeshis wouldn’t be interested, and that the youth is concerned about their careers. But seeing the young people who have joined our program, and to see how they’ve changed, how committed they are, and how optimistic they are about Bangladesh, i think that is really inspiring and promising and intoxicating because it makes you want to work hard.
Are you involved in any other sector besides education? What are your plans for yourself and Teach for Bangladesh in the next 5 years?
In terms of Teach for Bangladesh, I would say that we fall at an interesting cross-section of many different spaces. The education space is certainly our primary space because we think that education underpins the other challenges in Bangladesh. If we can solve the education crisis, then all of the other inequities, other injustices, the discrimination that exists in society, the various structural challenges – I find that if we address education it automatically sets the foundation for other solutions to come about. Although education is our realm of work, I would say there is an intersection with almost everything else.
We have alumni that have gone on to work for public health, technology, the corporate sector. Leadership is a thread which ties all of those together, so youth engagement, empowerment of young leaders and all of these related fields are part of our realm of work.
The plans for TFB are to do ultimately what is in the best interest of children in this country. There are few things. This year we have a very exciting development which is for the first time we are working outside Dhaka. For the first five years we focused on Dhaka city, and from this January we are also now working in Chottogram city, so we’ve finally branched out, and there will be other geographical expansions in the next 5 years.
We are exploring the idea of rural placements, as well as remote parts of Bangladesh. We are looking forward to working closely with the government. We work with government primary schools, and we want to deepen our partnership with the government. At the end of the day we all have the same vision, and we are all working towards SDG 4 which is about quality education for all children in Bangladesh and really ensuring that is going to require a real private-public partnership, so we are trying to build that coalition of organizations and institutions who are working towards quality education. We hope to work in secondary schools, as well as primary schools. In the next 5 years we’ll see some of the alumnis of our program who came out of the program a few years ago begin to actually help shift things at a more macro level. We’ll see more and more alumnis who are taking on mid and senior level leadership positions in various institutions. Alums who are starting up their own social enterprise, who are innovators, who are really challenging the status-quo. I think seeing that shift in our alums is one of the things we look forward to.
Outside of the government we have other partners as well for example BRAC University’s Institute of Education and Development which is a premier institution for research on education and training people and building capacity in education. All of our fellows are automatically enrolled in a post-graduate diploma at BRAC University in educational leadership through a partnership we have with BRAC IED. Our fellows have the opportunity to get a fully paid post-graduate diploma in educational leadership through BIED. We try to work with the entire education sector, other big and small NGOs, from BRAC to new startups on the scene. When you look at the history of Bangladesh, it shows us that we are very determined nation.
Despite the challenges, we are a very optimistic nation, and we’ve defied so many expectations to get to where we are, and the trajectory can only go up. So the question is not will it happen, rather when will it happen and on which side of history will we individually choose to be on, and what role we play to make it happen – which is an eventuality.
