Biography

I am a social development worker and entrepreneur — academically trained as a speech therapist, though my work has long since wandered beyond clinic walls. I write, talk, and research the social dimensions of disability, value-based youth development, and the innovation of interventions for people in low- and middle-income countries. Bangladesh is where I am rooted, and Bangladesh is where most of my questions come from.

I was born in Barishal in 1999. My father is a police officer; my mother keeps the home. I have a younger brother and a sister, and I now live with my wife and my family in the same household — something unremarkable here, and something I wouldn't trade.

My school years were spent at Dhaka Collegiate School, from the age of eight to sixteen, followed by two years at Udayan Higher Secondary School. The real turn came when I was admitted to the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Dhaka. The first year gave me academic foundations and, more importantly, a learning circle I still draw from. By the second year, I had taken my first part-time job at Saifur's and begun what I think of as my self-made life.

The pandemic changed the shape of things. In 2020, I joined a Community Support Team providing door-step COVID information and primary screening in Modhubagh, Dhaka. That same year, UNFAO contracted me as a facilitator on the same initiative, and I went on to onboard and train thousands of new CST members serving households across the city. It was my first serious encounter with the mechanics of grassroots development — slow, unglamorous, and entirely necessary.

By 2022, I was thinking hard about what came after graduation. I wanted to understand the real texture of Bangladeshi social life — who development actually reaches, how it moves, and where it fails. In 2023, just after finishing my final examinations, I joined the BRAC Youth Platform. I stayed for almost three years, which I think of in two parts. The first two years placed me in training and development, facilitating value-based inclusive youth programs and mentoring community projects led by young people. The following year shifted me toward communications at BracU — digital media, content development, calendar management, event scaling. It was a different register, but it taught me something important about how narratives shape institutions.

I now work at the Social Innovation Lab, where my focus is on bringing innovation into BRAC's programming — whether that means importing ideas from the Global South or refining what already exists. Currently I am working on two assignments: developing graduation criteria for BRAC's Integrated Development Program, and building a community-based disability support model through the Shubharna Sathi program under the UPG framework. The second of these sits at the centre of my professional life.

Disability has been my deepest preoccupation since university. I kept noticing how much of the harm done to persons with disabilities in Bangladesh was cultural rather than clinical — norms and assumptions quietly blocking the social protections that ought to exist. In 2019, while still a student, I founded Connecting Disorders, working on disability rights and awareness. Then in 2023, alongside that work, we established Jotner Dokan — a social enterprise attempting something specific: to bring persons with disabilities into the financial mainstream through a marketplace model that generates employment and contributes to GDP. The ambition, eventually, is to pilot and replicate this model across countries.

My research runs alongside all of this. My master's thesis examined the relationship between mobile phone use and speech delay in children. A paper I worked on subsequently — about developmental language knowledge among students in Bangladeshi public universities — is now published. My ongoing work is narrowing toward a single axis: the social aspects of disability, and what I am beginning to call disability health. The end point, as I see it now, is a PhD in public disability health or disability health infrastructure and policy. I want to leave a mark on how Bangladesh — and perhaps beyond — thinks about the innovation journey of persons with disabilities and young people.

Outside of work, I am someone who came late to reading but arrived with conviction. I travel when I can; in the past two years I have visited two countries and found the immersion in unfamiliar cultures quietly transformative. I prefer the company of people and give that company seriously when it is offered to me.

My favourite thing about myself is the same as what I try to bring to my work: the habit of finding possibility in the places others have given up on.