A small business flying on "digital wings" in Bangladesh

Anjumanara Sathi is married with two children and lives in Dhaka. She started her online business in 2016 with just US$60 borrowed from her husband. Today, she is the owner of two Facebook-based online stores, with an established brand and stock worth around $150,000.

Anjumanara is educated to a Master’s level, but after she completed her education, she failed to find suitable employment. After 37 unsuccessful attempts to secure a job, she eventually decided that her best option for financial security was to start an independent career with a small enterprise of her own. She borrowed $60 from her husband to establish her first business, Maliha Fashion.

As a physical business with shop premises was too expensive at this stage, Maliha Fashion was initially entirely online and run through Facebook. Anjumanara sourced dresses from local wholesale markets and sold them through her business pages, delivering them to customers herself with her husband’s help. Her business slowly expanded, but again she encountered a number of barriers.

Sourcing sufficient stock to meet the increasing demand proved difficult. She also struggled with logistics, and with making deliveries to remote districts outside Dhaka. Moreover, her operating costs remained extremely high, and business loans from a conventional bank were out of reach because she could not produce the necessary documentation. This in turn made it almost impossible to expand the business.

One of the worst barriers, she says, was that as a woman in Bangladesh, she faced a culture in which women are not taken seriously in a business environment. Although her husband has consistently supported her, many other people—including friends and family members—have questioned or laughed at her career aims. This extends to online bullying, particularly when she attempted to promote her business.

Another major drawback was her lack of digital literacy. Anjumanara owns a smartphone and a laptop, and she has good Internet access, but at the beginning, she had limited knowledge of how to use Facebook or other digital marketing options. She managed most of her business operation activities manually and by taking screenshots:

I did not even know how to open a business page online, nor did I know how to use the inbox for starting a conversation with the customers. The worst of all was I did not know how to type!

Then Anjumanara found ShopUp. “I took computer classes and very slowly started learning. ShopUp provided digital and financial literacy modules that helped me as a new entrant to the digital business arena.” ShopUp’s Facebook marketing support enabled her to reach customers in remote areas of the country and expand her customer base. At the same time, she was also finally able to expand her stock and employ the resources she needed to expand her business, by using the platform’s offer of loans based on her delivery transaction records. Using ShopUp’s RedX delivery platform alone provided her with a transaction record of more than $68,000, which she was able to leverage to secure a loan of $2,000. As a result, although the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 initially set her business back significantly, she was in a position to take advantage of the boom in e-commerce that followed.

Impact of the training on Anjumanara’s family and everyday life

Digital platforms like Facebook and ShopUp have given women entrepreneurs like me a chance to do business and learn how to be a business success and have transformed me into the entrepreneur I am today. Without these opportunities, and support from my husband, I could never have transformed my life the way I have in the last six years and become a self-sufficient woman.

Anjumanara Sathi
owner of Maliha Fashion, Mouli Fashion and Smart Kids

Impact of the training on Anjumanara’s financial and digital skills and financial decision-making

This year, Anjumanara has joined advanced digital financial literacy modules developed by ShopUp with support from UNCDF and Visa. So far, she has completed five virtual learning modules that are useful for her business operations and has particularly benefited from learning about how to promote her business through paid social media, as well as about e-commerce website creation and management.

Impact of the training on Anjumanara’s business

Anjumanara is now confident about managing her business digitally and believes that the new skills she has gained will help her improve her business further. She is able to hire specialists to manage aspects such as digital marketing, maintaining and updating her digital shop, and engaging with suppliers; but, importantly, she feels that her overall knowledge of these areas and how they work means that she is able to be a better manager. In the future, she would like to learn more about new technologies, and how to handle upgrades and changes in existing technologies and digital platforms.

Even today, Anjumanara’s business relies entirely on digital financial services and a business bank account; she does not use savings, insurance or credit products from banks. Yet she finally has a trade license, and she makes all her business decisions herself, with full backing from her husband.

ShopUp and other digital business platforms provided her with the support she needed to become an independent businesswoman, with access to finance and the ability to expand further.

Anjumanara feels that starting any type of business is challenging and that anyone who wants to try this route has to be prepared to struggle. It is also much harder for women, she points out from her own experience—many women fall victim to bullying and pressure from their families. However, digital business has gone some way to close the gender gap in this area, and she would definitely recommend this programme to other people who are setting it up on their own.