Survival Garden Kit

The ask

Sell affordable, curated seed kits with illustrated grow guides tailored to flood-prone Bangladeshi households — giving families a 30–60 day food buffer they can grow on a rooftop, courtyard, or raised bed with minimal inputs.

Why now

Climate shocks — cyclones, flash floods, prolonged inundation — are disrupting food supply chains multiple times a year in coastal Bangladesh. Governments and NGOs have begun recommending homestead gardening as a resilience measure, creating an institutional pull-through channel alongside retail. Seed packet printing costs and logistics have never been cheaper; WhatsApp-based agri-extension is already normalised.

Why Bangladesh

Bangladesh has roughly 40 million rural households, many of which lose vegetable access for 2–4 months after major floods. Elevated and container gardening on the concrete rooftops of peri-urban Dhaka is already practised informally — a kit just professionalises it. Local seed varieties (lal shak, data shak, bottle gourd, country bean) are cheap, high-yielding, and culturally appropriate; no import dependence.

As a business

The core product is a ৳250–500 seed+guide kit sold through agri-input shops, NGO distribution networks, and direct online. Margin is thin on kits alone (~35 %), but the repeat-purchase cycle — seasonal re-seeding — is the value driver. Add-on sales (grow bags, organic fertiliser sachets, drip tape) lift average order value and margin. INGO procurement contracts (BRAC, WFP, CARE) provide volume that subsidises the retail channel.

Economics

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

What ZEPH would back

A founder who has already piloted a kit with a cluster of households and has usage data — germination rates, household uptake, repeat orders. We are particularly interested in a team that has an NGO distribution relationship locked in from day one, which de-risks the demand side of an otherwise thin-margin product.

Impact

Each survival kit that results in a household growing its own vegetables for one season avoids an estimated 15–25 kg of food-chain emissions (cold transport, packaging, market waste) while building measurable climate resilience in flood- and cyclone-prone coastal Bangladesh. At 24 000 kits sold per year, the programme could reach 80 000+ individuals with a seasonal food buffer, meaningfully reducing dependency on emergency food aid and lowering post-disaster nutrition costs for the government. The kits also displace a small volume of imported seed packets (currently sourced from India and the Netherlands), keeping hard currency in-country and building local seed-saving knowledge.