Nasrin Haque
Executive Director, Dhaka
Sociologist who spent eleven years in district health administration before co-founding Srijoni. Sets programme strategy and holds the relationship with government counterparts.
Who We Are
Local roots. Rigorous evidence. Global accountability.
Srijoni Foundation sits between the village courtyard and the ministry committee room: we deliver services in the districts where women live, and we carry the resulting evidence into national policy.
Our Story
We started because two halves of the same problem never met.
Srijoni Foundation (সৃজনী ফাউন্ডেশন) was founded in 2018 by a small group of sociologists and public health practitioners who kept arriving at the same problem from opposite ends. The clinicians were treating women whose case histories nobody was recording. The researchers were writing about districts they had no route into.
The organisation began with a single mobile health camp in Mymensingh. Over four days, the clinicians recorded questions they could not answer from the consultation alone — how far a woman had travelled, who had decided she could come, what she had been told about contraception. Our first survey instrument was written to answer those questions, not to test a hypothesis we already held.
Since then the research side of the work has been carried out in ongoing collaboration with academic colleagues at the University of Dhaka and at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), who review our study designs and, where relevant, our ethics submissions.
Today the Foundation runs four connected programmes — mobile health camps, a sociological research hub, a counselling and legal helpline, and an adolescent girls' curriculum — across more than 40 districts.
- 2018 — Founded Registered in Dhaka by seven founding members; first mobile health camp held in Mymensingh district.
- 2020 — First longitudinal panel A cohort of households in four districts agreed to be re-interviewed annually, giving us change over time rather than snapshots.
- 2022 — Apon Jononi launched The counselling and legal referral helpline opened, initially three days a week, after camp clinicians reported cases they could not close.
- 2024 — First national policy submission Panel findings on rural contraceptive access submitted as written evidence to a national health consultation.
How We Work
Three operating principles we can be held to.
These are working rules rather than values statements: each one changes what we do on a given day, and each one is something a partner or a participant can hold us to.
Evidence before intervention
We do not open a programme in a district until we have baseline data from it. Where existing figures are thin, the first visit is a listening and survey visit, and the service design follows from what that visit returns.
Consent at every step
Participation in a survey is separate from receiving care; declining one never affects the other. Consent is taken verbally in Bangla, recorded, and can be withdrawn afterwards by contacting our research team.
Handover, not dependency
Every camp is planned with the district health office and a local clinic from the start, with the aim that routine follow-up sits with them. We measure a site by what continues after our van stops visiting.
Affiliations
Who we work alongside.
University of Dhaka
icddr,b
NGO Affairs Bureau
District Health Offices
Partner Clinics Network
Registration and regulatory details are listed in full in our annual report.
Our Team
A small core team, and the districts do the rest.
Eleven full-time staff in Dhaka, two part-time advisors abroad, and field teams contracted per camp cycle. The people below lead the four programme areas.
Dr Helen Marsden
Research Advisor, London
Epidemiologist advising on study design, sampling and analysis for the longitudinal panel. Reviews every instrument before it goes to field and co-authors our published findings.
Tanvir Rahman
Field Operations Manager
Runs mobile camp logistics across four divisions — routing, cold chain, clinician rosters and the scheduling agreements held with each district health office.
Farzana Kabir
Legal Counsel
Human rights lawyer leading the Apon Jononi referral network, vetting the partner advocates callers are referred to and overseeing safeguarding and data handling.
We recruit field researchers and clinicians for each camp cycle, and take on organisational partners year-round.
Where We Work
Headquartered in Dhaka. Accountable in three time zones.
- Dhaka — Headquarters All four programmes are managed here, together with the research hub, safeguarding and finance.
- London Academic liaison, study-design review and partnerships with UK-based funders and universities.
- New York Diaspora fundraising, donor reporting and relationships with North American foundations.
- Chattogram — Field office Camp scheduling for the south-east divisions and follow-up on cases referred from those camps.
- Rajshahi — Field office Camp scheduling across the north-west, plus panel re-interview rounds and helpline case follow-up.
Take Part
The evidence base only holds if enough people answer.
Registration for the 2026 research cycle is open, and the four programmes are described in full if you would rather start there.