Questions we get asked

Inclusivity is a design constraint, not a reporting line. Our goal is that at least 50% of Shathi partners are women and people facing disability-related barriers. Today 70% of participants are women, 15.4% are persons with disabilities and 19.2% are caregivers for persons with disabilities. Every critical journey has to work for someone with low literacy, limited smartphone confidence or a disability — which is why field-assisted completion and Bangla-first design exist.

No. Every figure on this site is an estimated range, not a promise. Returns come from a real production cycle — animals gain weight, a crop yields, output is sold — and a cycle can underperform through disease, weather or a market move. We publish the mechanism, the monitoring and the mitigation for each project, and we disclose what happens if a cycle falls short. Capital is at risk.

After project costs and the investor payout, the Shathi partner receives up to 50% of the remaining profit. The split is written into the contract-farming agreement before the cycle starts, and the per-kilogram price breakdown — B2B rate, platform fee, logistics, warehouse and vet care, net farmer rate — is shown to the farmer before they commit.

Projects are sold in units and the unit price is set per project — currently from ৳ 10,000 to ৳ 1,30,000. Payment is by mobile financial service (bKash, Nagad) or bank transfer online, and by cheque collection or direct bank deposit offline. Refunds are available within 15 days of the project start date; after that the capital is committed to the cycle.

Each project publishes milestone updates — collection, project start, mid-cycle, harvest or sale, and payout — along with a monthly report covering production progress, financial summary and the social impact recorded for the cohort. Updates arrive in the Shathi app and by SMS.

Through an Impact Monitoring and Measurement framework built around four value drivers — rural poverty, the gender gap, disability and environment — mapped to eleven stated outcomes. We track the share of women and persons with disabilities engaged, income change for Shathi partners against a household baseline, yield against the district baseline, and price realised against the published indicative rate.

No. DigiGram assesses, verifies, develops, originates, monitors and connects users to institutions. Where a bank or MFI is involved, that licensed lender retains full authority over KYC/AML, credit approval, pricing, disbursement and recovery. Shathi Sheba provides decision support; it does not approve credit.

Empowering 20,000 Shathi input partners with improved, sustainable livelihoods and market access by 2030, and reaching 50,000 smallholder farmers — particularly women and persons with disabilities — living below or near the poverty line in rural Bangladesh.