Arif Md. Waliullah Bhuiyan has received the National SME Foundation Award 2023 from the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for his enormous contribution to children education in Bangladesh. He received the best Entrepreneur Award from SME Foundation, offered by the commerce Ministry of Bangladesh.
This year, a total of seven founders including Waliullah Bhuiyan has received this prestigious award. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina handed over the award on May 19th in the inauguration ceremony of the 11th National SME Fair 2024 at BICC, Agargaon, Dhaka.
Waliullah Bhuiyan, the founder of Light of Hope is a EEE Graduate from IUT and completed his Masters on Energy & Environmental Management with DAAD Scholarship from Germany. He received Unilever Global Entrepreneur Award in 2018 and completed Sustainable Leadership program from University of Cambridge, UK.
He came back from Germany to work on preparing children for the future with 21st century skills, so that they can compete globally.
Wali’s company Light of Hope Ltd. created a complete eco-system for primary school children with highly researched learning products, contents, courses for children to prepare them with future skills.
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Goofi, the media franchise for kids, is owned by Light of Hope Ltd. Waliullah Bhuiyan created a range of popular characters among children who help children to develop empathy, creativity, problem solving skills and emotional intelligence.
Based on these characters, Waliullah Bhuiyan has written and published children books with wonderful stories with powerful life-changing messages for children. The stories are then animated and aired on TV so that millions of children can learn from the show.
Kids Time, begins as the creative after-school program in 2017, now offering various courses for children through online and in its centers. A total of 4000+ children graduated from craft, drawing, storymaking, spoken English and Singapore Math courses.
Light of Hope runs Teachers Time, another brand that directly provides training to the teachers and parents on parenting. Till date, this initiative trained over 20,000 teachers and more than 1 lakh parents.
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The company established 620 libraries in schools across Bangladesh with age-appropriate books to help children improve their reading skills. Currently, more than 250,000+ children are getting access to these books through his project called ‘Porua’.
On receiving the award, Waliullah Bhuiyan said, “I have been working on children education for almost 10 years now. We are probably the only private initiative in Bangladesh that is working to prepare children for the future. It gives me tremendous joy and also satisfaction that Bangladesh Government has recognized the importance of our work.
This will encourage my entire team to upheld this award and inspire us to bring our products and services to the global market.
I thank Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Commerce Ministry and SME Foundation for nominating me as the Best Entrepreneur”.
