Sazzad Hossain

Gen.t His personal struggles led the founder of SDI Academy to start an edtech business helping migrant workers

Singapore’s foreign workforce numbers went beyond 1.2 million in December last year. This figure includes work permit holders such as foreign domestic workers and those hired in the construction sector. Many of them face cultural and language barriers, which can lead to related issues such as not being able to understand workplace safety and health regulations as well as enduring social isolation.

For Sazzad Hossain, whose family left Bangladesh for Singapore when he was 11 years old, these issues hit close to home. And it was from his own experiences as a foreigner in a new country that led him to start his social enterprise, SDI Academy, eight years later.

When Sazzad arrived in Singapore, he knew very little English. He struggled to keep up with his peers after enrolling into a local primary school and was placed in a class that was two levels below. But he picked up the language fairly quickly and later began teaching the migrant workers in his neighbourhood with whom he had made friends. Through word of mouth, his student base grew and he launched the SDI Academy, which has since trained over 8,500 migrant workers with skills in English communication, financial and IT literacy, and entrepreneurship.

During the pandemic, the social enterprise launched a mobile app to facilitate virtual learning, along with other features such as diarying and speech recognition. Sazzad has also been running pilot tests for his second startup, Doormart. The food subscription and delivery service platform has distributed 5,000 meals since it started in late 2019 and, in time, would be integrated into SDI Academy’s app. Sazzad shares more about his work and future plans.

The migrant worker community has a huge potential for transformation.

The multiplier impact we can achieve by empowering this community and their future generations motivates me to do what I do. Some of our beneficiaries have seen great successes and are paying it forward by establishing their own social organisations.

I started teaching English to migrant workers after hearing their struggles.

Many of them told me that they couldn’t understand the safety instructions given to them at work because they were in English. So I taught them the language because their lives were at stake.

We customise our courses to meet the needs of our community.

Beyond training, we also provide community-building support and activities, and are exploring ways to help their families too.

There’s something we can all learn from migrant workers.

The fact that they left home to work in another country, and send back almost everything that they earn, shows us the love they have for their families. It reminds us of the filial piety that social scientists say tends to become a less important cultural value as a society progresses.

Generation T is Tatler Asia’s platform for the Leaders of Tomorrow. generationt.asia