Women Social Entrepreneur supporting 30,000 people with 30 projects in 9 years
One Degree Initiative Foundation, which was founded in 2005, is a social enterprise working on various projects with 7000 young volunteers and also actively supporting social entrepreneurs. Today, Cocoro Limited conducted an interview with Ms. Sabanaz Rashid Diya, the founder and managing director of One Degree Initiative.
Cocoro: First, I would like to ask you about the activity of One Degree Initiative.
Diya: One Degree promotes activities that are conducted by young people for young people. There are mainly two pillars of our activities. The first is a volunteer program to nurture young people’s leadership skills. The second pillar is to support social entrepreneurs. In the volunteer programme, we are working on various projects and provide many opportunities for young people to engage in social issues such as Education and Environment. The unique point of the project is that we introduce Mentoring System. The Mentoring System is that the graduates of the program watch, supervise, and direct their juniors as a mentor. Through the transition from receiving the training to giving the training, the leadership of those young people is nurtured. Furthermore, as for supporting social entrepreneur, we do our activity to support young people’s startup business. We are the first organization in Bangladesh organizing Start Up Weekend in 2014 that is globally well-known program. We are utilizing the network that we have developed to make the will of young people who have good ideas and skills into shape.
Cocoro: Could you give us an example of the activities included in the volunteer programme?
Diya: So far, we have worked on 30 projects. We established small schools in nation wide where young volunteers teach English and Mathematics to those disabled children who are not able to study as they wish. We also translated 2000 Khan Academy education videos into Bangla with the help of the volunteers and created a comparable table in accordance with Bangladesh Study curriculum. In addition, we have worked on various activities such as picking up trash in a polluted area for the awareness building to protect environment, providing a bicycles to women living in a rural area, establishing a library in a rural area, establishing a tourist information center, and creating bus route map. Through the projects, young people produce and develop their own ideas and also make an implementation. This nurtures the leadership of them and makes them grow. Our program contributes to produce promising young people, some of which entered in Graduate Schools in western countries such as MIT and Stanford University.
Cocoro: What are the activities in supporting social entrepreneurs.
Diya: So far the main activities of this pillar have been organizing events. However, we are trying to step forward and provide a direct and specific support activity. The ongoing project is to create a center where young and energetic entrepreneurs and also the stakeholders who support those entrepreneurs get together and exchange their opinions. What entrepreneurs needs is not only finance, but also opportunity to consult and mentoring to overcome their challenges and difficulties. This is what I learned from the intensive discussions with entrepreneurs and the concerned person. Then I realized the importance of visible and physical ‘PLACE’ where collaboration could happen. We are making the project planning and raise funds to create a multipurpose facility including Café, Reference Room, Seminar Room, and Co-working Space.
Cocoro: What is One Degree’s future plan?
Diya: Presently, the activities of One Degree are spreading out into Nepal, Afghanistan, Canada, and Australia beyond Bangladesh. I also have visited to Japan this year and met many Japanese Social Entrepreneurs. I hope there will be more collaboration environment across the nations including the center I mentioned before.
Cocoro: What is your expectation for Japan?
Diya: I am interested in Japanese technology and I would like to know more about what kind of technologies there are in Japan. I also want to know what Japanese people are interested in, what makes them motivated to work together with people in Bangladesh. I would like to know that.
[The editors note]: Ms. Diya has such a strong passion and she is a highly motivated and visionary woman social entrepreneur that fascinated me. The point that impressed me was she repeated the sentence ‘small change makes huge difference’. Anybody at anytime can make a small change, and that is important change. This interview was taken in Cocoro Limited Office, but I would really like to conduct the next interview in the field.
Reference: Facebook Page One Degree Initiative