Challenge Fund Bootcamp review by Bangladesh’s fintech innovators

11 teams from 10 organisations participated in an intensive Challenge Fund Bootcamp by BFP-B in association with DFS Lab from October 14, 2018 to October 17, 2018. During the four days, participants followed a sprint process to address key business challenges and create prototypes of their solutions. What were the key takeaways for the teams? Read our blog post to know what the participants had to say.

Jeeon

“Jeeon provides solutions to informal rural medical practitioners to scale their businesses. While developing the most effective prototype in the Bootcamp, we uncovered key challenges which we did not anticipate.”

Apon Well-Being

“We want to ensure formal credit for financial inclusion of RMG workers and this Bootcamp has been helpful to trace the road map. This was a great learning experience for Apon.”

Cloud-coder

“The most significant takeaway for us from this Bootcamp was learning the process of accomplishing more in less time. We created a prototype in a very tight deadline and that is something we never thought was possible.”

D2

“The Bootcamp was very intense and we learned a lot. D2 strives to connect businesses looking for reliable market data with a network of agents around the country who get paid to collect that data. These agents are mostly unemployed youth from low-income backgrounds. We hope we can take the learnings from the sprint process, identify quick solutions and implement them for creating better opportunity for the youth.”

Direct Fresh

“The goal of our project is to cater to the basic commodity needs of workers of all factories. For now, we are providing them with basic food. We hope to expand in the future. The Bootcamp and entire sprint process has helped us clarify our vision in terms of the perfect strategy or roadmap for implementing the solution we came up with.”

Dmoney

“We are very excited with the possibility of digitisation of payments and services and we hope to contribute to that. The Bootcamp has been extremely valuable in helping us understand a proper strategy that can be implemented to digitise payments.”

Misfit Technologies

“The Bootcamp was a very exciting opportunity for us to learn more about our own products. It helped us understand and shape a sustainable model to implement our ideas.”

SafeConnect

“SafeConnect’s initial model was all about connecting people with fresh food through a prepaid payment system, but from the Bootcamp, a key learning was people will be not be ready to go for a 100% prepaid payment system. This is something we discovered on the last day of the Bootcamp during customer interviews. And this was vital for us.”

Wind Bazaar

“Wind Bazaar aims to record transactions that take place in the local markets, colloquially known as haats in Bangladesh. While creating the prototype, we got insight into some problems which we had not considered earlier. With the sprint process though, we were also able to easily draw a solution.”

SME Cafe

“We are unique, as our work is rural-based enterprise development. We are an impact investment facilitator working towards access to finance and access to markets for rural entrepreneurs. During the sprint process I was able to dig out key critical issues, like work process. This will help me make better strategies and working interventions, tools and techniques.”