Learning Gardens

The ask

Build a franchise-like social enterprise that designs, installs, and maintains regenerative food gardens at schools and community centres across Bangladesh, training teachers and community members in sustainable growing while selling the curriculum and maintenance subscriptions.

Why now

Bangladesh's 2023 national curriculum reform (New Curriculum) introduced "Work and Life" as a compulsory subject for classes 6–10, explicitly including food growing and environmental stewardship. Schools now have a mandate and budget line for hands-on environmental education — a demand signal that did not exist two years ago. The movement is proven at scale in Kenya (Grow Biointensive), Thailand (Alternatives Learning Centres), and India (Organic India's school garden programme).

Why Bangladesh

Over 33,000 government secondary schools and 80,000 primary schools operate across BD, almost all with unused courtyard or rooftop space. Urban BD children have little exposure to food systems — a growing body of evidence links food-literacy gaps to poor nutrition outcomes (BD's stunting rate is 28 %). School gardens that produce edible vegetables create a direct, measurable nutrition co-benefit alongside the climate curriculum. BRAC's education network is a natural distribution partner.

As a business

Revenue from installation fees (৳40,000–1,20,000 per school depending on size), annual maintenance subscriptions (৳15,000–30,000/year), teacher-training workshops, and curriculum licensing. Corporate CSR is a parallel channel — garment factories, banks, and telecoms all have education-CSR mandates. A social-enterprise structure allows access to USAID, FCDO, and UNICEF grants without compromising the commercial model.

Economics

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

What ZEPH would back

We want a founder who is already running gardens in at least 20 schools with measurable outcomes (student participation, produce yield, teacher confidence scores). The curriculum-licensing model is the scalable layer — we'd help a founder build the IP asset and the training-of-trainers system that allows growth without proportional headcount. A blended-finance structure with one FCDO or UNICEF grant alongside equity would be the right capitalisation.

Impact

A network of 200 active school gardens displaces roughly 200 tonnes of imported synthetic fertiliser per year and eliminates the carbon cost of peri-urban vegetable trucking to those schools, while sequestering modest soil carbon through composting practices. Each garden creates 1–2 part-time green-education jobs and trains several hundred children annually as food-literate future consumers and growers. The hard-currency saving is modest individually, but aggregated across Bangladesh's 33,000 government secondary schools the addressable displacement of imported chemical inputs reaches eight figures in US dollars annually.