Impact
Our Non-Profits
A university and a foundation, both funded by the group and neither run for a return — the part of Gemcon that was never meant to appear on a balance sheet.
Why we do this
We rise by lifting others
Two institutions carry the part of the founder’s work that has nothing to do with the businesses.
The University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh was set up because the country had plenty of places to learn a trade and very few that taught people how to think. The Kazi Shahid Foundation was set up because a tea estate cannot be the best employer in a district where children have no school and families have no clinic.
Neither is a corporate social responsibility line item. Both are separately governed, separately staffed and funded on a standing commitment from the group rather than on whatever is left at the end of a good year.
Where the work happens
Two institutions, permanently funded
Separately governed, separately staffed, and answerable for their own results.
Education
University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh
Founded in 2002 by Kazi Shahid Ahmed, ULAB was one of the first universities in the country built on a liberal-arts model — broad first, specialised second.
The argument for it was straightforward: an economy that was about to need engineers, marketers and administrators would need them to be able to write, argue and change their minds. Two decades on, the campus in Dhanmondi runs undergraduate and graduate programmes across business, engineering, media and the humanities, alongside research centres in climate, journalism and Bangla studies.
The group’s commitment is financial and permanent, but the university is independent of it — its own board, its own faculty, and no obligation to send a single graduate to a Gemcon company.
- Need-based scholarships
- Research centres
- Liberal arts core
2002
Founded
6500+
Students
20+
Programmes
Community
Kazi Shahid Foundation
The group’s social arm in Panchagarh — schooling, primary healthcare and women’s livelihoods, built around the Tetulia tea estate and open to everyone in the district.
The foundation grew out of a practical problem. The estate needed people, the people needed a reason to stay, and the district offered neither a decent school nor a clinic within a day’s travel. So the foundation built both, then kept going: cattle lending at no interest, seed and training programmes for smallholders, and a livelihoods centre that puts women through skills courses and into work.
It is deliberately unglamorous work, measured in attendance registers and patient lists rather than in launches. The households it reaches are counted in the group’s annual sustainability report, on the same page as the emissions figures.
- Estate schools
- Mobile health camps
- Interest-free cattle lending
3
Schools run
45000+
Patients a year
1200+
Women in training
6500+
Students enrolled
ULAB, this academic year
1400+
Scholarships awarded
Need and merit, since 2002
45000+
Patients treated
Foundation clinics and camps
50000+
Households reached
Across the Tetulia programmes
On the ground
What it looks like
Campus, clinic, classroom and collection day — the two organisations at work.
The campus at Dhanmondi
Scholarship intake day
The estate school at Tetulia
Mobile health camp, Panchagarh
Cattle lending, first collection
The women’s training centre
We rise by lifting others.
Kazi Shahid Ahmed
Founder & Chairman
Get involved
Partner with the foundation
Organisations working on education, health or rural livelihoods in northern Bangladesh are welcome to write to us — the foundation partners far more often than it works alone.