Eshrat Waris

2022 - 2023

From:

Bangladesh

Sector:

Agriculture

Location:

Bangladesh

Degree:

Sloan Fellows MBA, Sloan School of Management

Eshrat Waris is a social impact focused product and business strategist with diverse sector experience: World Bank, BRAC (non-profit) and SOLshare (clean energy startup). Her work centers on building resilience. At SOLshare, she structured the regulatory sandbox to interconnect their peer-to-peer solar microgrid with the national grid. Previously, she led BRAC Skill Development Programme’s digital transformation and was at the World Bank headquarter working on social protection, urban and governance issues.

She is now building her own agribusiness venture to improve agricultural yield and soil fertility using biosolid fertilizer. Bangladesh’s green revolution increased food production and fostered self-sufficiency but it came at the cost of deteriorating soil condition. In nearly half the land, soil acidity has reduced soil productivity to 75%.

Eshrat’s biosolid fertilizer combines high moisture and nitrogen content from fecal matter with organic carbon in organic solid waste to tackle this challenge. Both these biological wastes currently remain underutilized. Her venture is optimizing the biosolid fertilizer production processing to make it affordable to both smallholder and commercial farmers.

Her focus on sustainability and affordability is driven by both her work and educational experience. She pursued her higher and graduate education at the United World College in Wales, Warwick University, and the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.