Vision
A Bangladesh where a student’s chance to do research or pursue postgraduate study depends on their curiosity and effort — not on which tier of college they happened to end up in.
Mission
Research for Bangladesh trains and places research fellows inside National University-affiliated colleges — the most resource-limited tier of the country’s higher education — the way Teach For Bangladesh places teaching fellows inside underserved schools.
Our Theory of Change
- Recruit Fellows. Identify graduates with research training — people who have done what most National University-affiliated college students are never shown is possible — and prepare them to work inside these colleges.
- Place & Train. Pair fellows with host colleges; build a short curriculum around literature access, AI-assisted synthesis, and structured mentoring — the scaffolding that had to be improvised alone as an undergraduate at BAIUST.
- Close the Teacher-Side Gap. Fellows work alongside existing faculty too, not just students — because many of those faculty are themselves National University graduates who were never trained in research either.
Our Method: Research Access, Not Just Research Training
In rural and under-resourced Bangladesh, a paywalled journal article or an out-of-print book might as well not exist. AI-assisted literature search and synthesis can close that gap — for a newsroom today, and for a first-generation research student tomorrow. See the Broadsheet pilot
Where We Start
National University-affiliated colleges: the tier narrowed further by gender norms and cost, where most students who survive Bangladesh’s education system end up, and where a research culture has never been built. Read the full case