Biniyog Briddhi partners with four impact enterprises

Biniyog Briddhi, a multi-year programme, has teamed up with four innovative impact enterprises – HelloTask, Romoni, SafeWheel and Shuttle.

The signing ceremony, to this end, took place at the LightCastle Office in the capital on Tuesday, LightCastle said in a press release.

Through this partnership, the impact enterprises will receive funding support to scale up their business and implement impact monitoring systems to better report on their social mission, according to the press release.

All the enterprises have a strong focus on women’s empowerment, logistics, caregiving and health services throughout Bangladesh, the press release said.

Amongst other guests, according to the press release, Corinne Henchoz Pignani, deputy director of Cooperation and Ameena Chowdhury, programme manager from the Embassy of Switzerland in Bangladesh; Maxime Cheng, lead of Market & Capacity Building Programs at Roots of Impact; and Bijon Islam, chief executive officer at LightCastle Partners; attended the signing ceremony.

The press release quoted Corinne Henchoz Pignani as saying, “Through the B-Briddhi programme, Switzerland wants to support impact enterprises, to have better access to financing options and be equipped to be attract investors. In addition, most importantly, we want to promote the culture of impact monitoring amongst social enterprises.”

Maxime Cheng, also the programme manager of BBriddhi, was quoted to have said in the release, “Impact Ready Matching Fund is first of its kind to provide incentives for early-stage impact enterprises to establish impact management practices as an integral part of their business operations.

"We are excited to see this pioneering cohort leveraging their impact data to inform their business decisions and growth from Biniyog Briddhi is through the Impact Ready Matching Fund (IRMF) scheme, a matching fund for social enterprises, which matches the equity investments from investors and reduces the enterprises’ funding cost by 50%."

These grants will be conditional on the introduction of robust systems to measure social and environmental impacts, according to the press release.

The next round of call for applications for the catalytic funding will open in April this year. This scheme is open to both early-stage and growth-stage impact enterprises, the release added.

B-Briddhi is a multiyear partnership between the Embassy of Switzerland in Bangladesh, Roots of Impact and LightCastle Partners along with other stakeholders including investors, private sector organisations, incubators and support organisations for impact enterprises.