Climate & Food Fellowship

The ask

Launch a fellowship that selects 10–15 high-potential Bangladeshi founders or researchers working on climate and food-system transformation, funds their first year with a living stipend and project budget, and connects them to a global mentor network.

Why now

Bangladesh has no domestic equivalent of Echoing Green, Acumen Academy, or 1000 Climates — the mechanisms that turned individual moral ambition into funded projects in other markets. The cohort of BD climate-tech founders is growing but under-resourced; most leave for graduate school abroad because there is no local path to funded independent work. A fellowship that pays people to stay and build changes that calculus.

Why Bangladesh

BD is simultaneously one of the world's most climate-exposed countries and one of its most entrepreneurially dense. BRAC University, Dhaka University, and BUET produce technically capable graduates who have direct lived experience of floods, heat, and food insecurity — an asset no MIT lab can replicate. Retaining that talent in BD, pointed at BD's problems, is high-leverage. The fellowship's alumni network becomes a ZEPH deal-flow pipeline.

As a business

A fellowship is a philanthropic instrument but generates compounding returns for a venture platform. Structurally: a ৳5–10 crore endowment (or recurring corporate sponsorships from BD garment, telecom, and banking sector CSR budgets) funds the stipends. ZEPH Ventures holds pro-rata rights in any company formed by fellows during or within 24 months of their fellowship — a standard arrangement used by On Deck, Interact, and Nucleate. The carried interest from those investments is the financial return.

Economics

Move the sliders to model your own fellowship programme. Defaults are order-of-magnitude estimates — pressure-testing them is part of what a founder pitches us.

What ZEPH would back

We are actively designing this — it is not a passive RFS. We want a programme director who has run cohort-based learning or accelerator programmes in South Asia and can build relationships with BD corporate CSR departments. The fellowship is ZEPH's talent-scouting infrastructure as much as it is a climate intervention.

Impact

A fellowship's direct carbon impact is not measurable in tonnes — its leverage is the portfolio of companies fellows go on to build. Based on comparable programmes (Echoing Green, On Deck), roughly 30–50 % of fellows launch organisations within two years; a 12-person cohort running annually for five years would seed 15–30 climate ventures that would not otherwise exist in Bangladesh. The real climate impact is the counterfactual: each technically capable BUET or BRAC University graduate who stays in Bangladesh — rather than emigrating for a UK or US graduate programme — carries their climate expertise into the local economy for decades. At population-level, that talent retention effect is worth more than any single company.