ACHIEVING MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS THROUGH SOCIAL BUSINESS The idea of achieving our MDGs through social business

is an ingenious idea and a pioneering step towards realizing them. The MDGs are a benchmark that help us grow a vision of where we want to see ourselves after 5,10 or 15 years. It also outlines the pressing issues that demand our immediate concern and need to be addressed. These MDGs are crucial for our development and their fulllment is mandatory if we hope to see Bangladesh as an economically and socially developed nation. By accomplishing these MDGs we grow not just as individuals, or a group or a class or a sector or a portion of the society but as a nation. It is an evidence of our duty towards our nation, an illustration of our national unity and integrity. Our forefathers fought together handed us this nation, now it's our responsibility to transform and evolve it into the SHONAR BANGLA that they dreamt of. Hence the MDGs have shown us a path or rather the steps to achieving our goals as a nation. The MDGs mainly concentrate on developing the nation in all spheres. It tries to address the poverty issues, health and hygiene issues, environmental as well as economic issues. MDG1: Poverty MDG2: Health and Hygiene MDG3: Education MDG4: Sanitation MDG5:Population Planning MDG6: Nutrition MDG7: Water MDG8: ICT Thus the MDGs focus on overall development of our nation. Social Business is a relatively new concept. A social is benets both the owner of the business through prots as well as it addresses a problem within our society by improving the standard of living of the backward classes. In order to be able to address the MDG issues with the help of social business, we need to rst identify why these issues exist in our country. Once we have identied the reason, then we can come to a common point of agreement that both improves the situation while ensuring prot to the business owner. For instance, the rst MDG addresses the problem poverty, It aims at eradicating poverty from our society by improving the economic condition of the poor. If we look at a particular rural village, we see that most of the people are poverty stricken. If we dig deep we nd that most of the villagers do not have a steady source of a sizable income. They work in the elds of the landowners which keeps them employed for only about 6 months. The rest of the year they are out of work. Hence, the solution to bring them out of poverty would be to give them a source of income. In this case a private businessman can step in and buy livestock for a handful of families. The families can look after their livestock, grow them, and sell the milk or any other produce they get from it. Out of this earning, they can return the amount invested by the businessman in installments plus a small portion of interest. Thus

the businessman not only makes prot he has helped a village become self-reliant and rescued them from poverty. This is how a social business functions. MDG2 tries to address health and hygiene issues such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, malaria, HIV AIDS etc. The mortality rates in rural Bangladesh is high because most people are unaware and ignorant of the proper practices. A private company or organization can set up a clinic and carry out educational campaigns to teach the local population. Once they are aware of it, the clinic can provide pre and post-natal care to mothers and earn prots by running the clinic. Any private business can come to the locals and teach them how to save themselves against dangerous mosquitoes and sell them mosquito nets and coils and earn prots out of it. Companies selling condoms can even promote and educate safe sex and earn prots by increasing their sales in rural areas. Once again it's a social business with private companies earning prots and local people benetting along with it. MDG3 promotes primary education. We can see that very few girls pursue higher education. The reason is that, families nd the expense of educating a girl a burden and would have her work at home instead. A private company can start a program called each one-teach one. Under this program students can be trained to teach other children who are unable to come to school or need special care at home to understand subjects and topics taught in class. By charging fees from those students who need private tutoring, the school can pay a small amount to the student tutors in exchange for going to homes of girls who are unable to attend classes and teaching them the daily lessons. The school can even earn prots out of this project. MDG4 addresses sanitation issues. Companies selling bathroom sanitary products and utensils such as harpic etc. can set up latrines in villages and teach them how to maintain and abide by the sanitary standards. This would also improve sales of their products and utensils. MDG5 aims to address family planing. Pharmaceutical companies can educate married couples to use birth control pills thus helping the society and earning prots from increased sales of pills. MDG6 looks into the nutritional issues. Pharmaceutical companies can provide samples of nutritional supplements and demonstrate their use. Following that, people would buy them from local pharmacy thus increasing sales of the pharmaceutical company. MDG7 tries to ensure clean drinking water for all. Even in this case pharmaceutical companies can teach them water unifying techniques and then later make chemicals available at local pharmacies so that people can purchase them and thus earn greater prots. MDG8, the aim is to improve ICT in remote areas. With the onset of mobile operators who are setting up mobile towers all over the country to provide coverage. The outcome has been that even rural villas now have mobile coverage

and can even avail value added services from which mobile operators earn prots. Thus through social business it is possible not only to benet the private businessmen and investors but also improve the overall socio-economic condition of the people in our society.