Parveen Sultana Huda

Parveen is one of the widely recognized professional of Bangladesh with 23+ years of experience in the Human Resources and Project Management fields with leading organizations both as a professional and consultant. She is currently working for BRAC University's Centre for Entrepreneurship Development as a Project Manager to manage a 4 year project titled Digital RMG Factory Mapping - Bangladesh. This project is being funded by A Foundation and administered by BRAC USA. Parveen started her own consulting firm – Renaissance Consultants Ltd. – in 2006 and has so far provided HR Development; Management, Organizational Development, Project Management and Business Development support to various local and international clients. She has worked for some reputed foreign organizations including the Asia Indigenous People’s Pact Foundation (Thailand), British Council, RTI International (USA), PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, UK), Agro-Inputs Project (AIP funded by USAID’s Feed the Future program), ILO, GIZ (previously GTZ), ITC (International Trade Centre – Geneva), ActionAid Vietnam, ActionAid Pakistan, etc.

Can businesses sell nutritious products to the poor?

5. Dec 2012

As we try and support commercial businesses to help them develop fortified biscuits for the retail market in Bangladesh - we are trying to draw on lessons learnt from various other nutrition related projects in Bangladesh. For example you can read a write up of the Grameen - Danone Joint Venture trying to produce and sell fortified yogurts to the rural poor.

The prospects seem very potential for fortified biscuits but before we actually enter into the details - we move ahead with cautious steps. Some of the biscuit manufacturers we have met are very excited by the prospect, some are very skeptical. Most remain to wait and see – the followers.

Our project actually spun off from the World Food Programme's procurement challenge as they sought BIF support to increase the capacity of their fortified biscuit suppliers. WFP procures fortified biscuit to feed 1.2 million primary school children as an incentive to come to school through their School Feeding Programme. The Government of Bangladesh as expressed their interest to take over the SFP from WFP and feed 2.4 million children in the most poor and vulnerable areas in Bangladesh. This means double the business for the existing suppliers and nightmares for the WFP Procurement Team!

So, in order for the existing suppliers to grow their capacity to produce more fortified biscuits and also to identify new potential suppliers, BIF is working with WFP to help achieve this ambitious agenda.

As we planned and discussed the actual objectives of our development intervention – we thought why only limit ourselves to this School Feeding Programme and its 2.4 million children only. Mal-nutrition is a serious problem in Bangladesh and it is also known as Invisible Hunger – because even less vulnerable lower income families suffer from this deficiency. They may get to eat more food – but the food does not always contain the required daily nutrition content needed for healthy living. So, we brainstormed amongst BIF and WFP teams and wanted to offer a bigger opportunity to the biscuit factories.

We offered them the whole population of Bangladesh as potential customers of their fortified biscuits. Of course that has so many challenges and we are beginning to realize some of them as we begin our work in this sector. Our intervention began with a biscuit manufacturing sector mapping and our consultants found 76 potential companies who make biscuits with automatic machines. We intentionally left out the hundreds of small bakeries which make biscuits manually. As the numbers are much beyond what our budgets can cover – we have planned to offer Needs Assessment for about 15-20 of these companies, which includes the existing suppliers of WFP. Most of the existing suppliers took our support and welcomed the consultant and BIF team to visit their factories, head office and access their files and various information. We have offered the same support to about 25-30 more companies – who has been shortlisted from the 76 companies based on some agreed criteria, on a first come first serve basis.

Please stay tuned as I will keep updating you on this exciting project and our challenges as we try and support these businesses develop fortified biscuits for the retail market.