Chang Jung Christian University of Taiwan has signed an agreement with Yunus Centre to establish a Yunus Social Business Centre for the promotion of social business.
Yung-Lung Lee, president of the university, and Nobel laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus signed the memorandum of understanding at a programme at Yunus Centre in Dhaka on Monday.
Philippa Tsai and Juno Wang of the Foundation for Yunus Social Business Taiwan were also present at the ceremony, Yunus Centre said in a statement.
With the new one, the number of Yunus Social Business Centre across the world now stands at 32, according to the statement. The agreement was signed on the sidelines of the 437th Social Business Design Lab programme at the Grameen Bank auditorium in Dhaka.
About 140 national and international participants from Afghanistan, Brazil, Austria and Italy took part in the programme chaired by Prof Yunus.
Six new business plans by new entrepreneurs, who are the children of Grameen Bank borrowers' families, were presented at the lab.
The business plans included a lemon farming project, retail clothing store, ICT venture and agri-tool manufacturing.
Rabeya Begum Shima, a mother of two, presented her business expansion plan for Village Multimedia.
Considered an enterprising and entrepreneurial role model for young women in the area, Rabeya has established herself as an ICT entrepreneur. She wants to scale up her business and provide more technology-related services to the people of the area.
Another new entrepreneur M Tarek has taken up agriculture as his profession. He has set up a lemon orchard where he cultivates different varieties of the fruit. He wants to scale up his orchard with an equity investment from social business fund.
Md Nazmul Haque Chowdhury, also an entrepreneur, presented his plan to expand his retail readymade clothing store, Ona Fashion.
Entrepreneur Ariful Islam presented his business plan for producing cost-effective mechanical paddy threshing equipment. All business plans were discussed and approved for funding.
Since the beginning of the labs in January 2013, over 10,899 projects have been presented in the last 436 lab programmes. Of the projects, 10,874 have been approved for equity funding investments ranging from Tk 1 lakh to Tk 5 lakh. More than Tk 100 crore has been invested in these projects so far.
