Teach For Bangladesh as a de facto social enterprise : What is it and where is it going?

[Excerpt] This chapter is a partial outcome of the first author’s completed doctoral research (Adhikary, 2019). Methodologically combining network ethnography (Howard, 2002) and global ethnography (Burawoy, 1991), this broader research examined: (a) the nature of TFB as the localisation of a globalised reform (de Sousa Santos, 2002); (b) the emerging policy conditions facilitating such localisations (Peck & Theodore, 2015); and (c) the cultural and topological spatial formulation (Allen, 1999; Appadurai, 1996; Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012; Massey, 1994) of policy influences (Tompkins-Stange, 2016), which animate such global-local policy dynamics. Data were collected from multiple sources, including official websites, social media pages, posted videos and photos, online news articles, TV talk-shows and interviews, inaugural speeches, panel discussions, government documents, programme proposals, and policy dialogue events, all complementing in-depth semi-structured interviews. Continuous theoretical and empirical reflections informed the qualitative methods of analyses that also had some quantitative aspects. Ethical processes such as informed consent and gatekeeper’s permission were obtained as both the broader research and this chapter instrumentalised TFB to analyse key debates and dynamics that characterise Bangladesh’s move from NGOs towards an SE future.

The chapter does not seek to theorise social enterprises; rather, it engages with TFB’s social entrepreneurial DNA as explained by the founder herself. Her stories and stances act as a gateway to the developments and debates that signal a social entrepreneurial imagination (Anderson, 1983; Appadurai, 1996) of policy and governance of primary education in Bangladesh. As such, we seek to examine how (or if at all) TFB and its founder ‘embody’ 2 a social entrepreneurial identity and future. We consider how the properties of such embodiment speak to the global social entrepreneurial discourses and practices that vitally influence educational policy and governance today. In the conclusion, we consider some policy developments in Bangladesh that characterise the local manifestations of such global social entrepreneurial policyscapes.