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Country’s leading mental health care platform, Moner Bondhu, is awarded UN Women 2021 Asia-Pacific WEPs Awards today in the Youth Leadership category for their remarkable stories of business resilience, innovation and commitment to improve a range of gender issues. As a women-led organization with majority of women staff, Moner Bondhu marked the history of Bangladesh to be the first organization to win this prestigious award in the Youth Leadership Category. Followed by critical screening and evaluation of more than 700 applications from 20 countries, Moner Bondhu is chosen in the Youth Leadership category for showing the world that business can be a key driver for gender equality and women’s empowerment especially when it comes to offer professional services in mental healthcare.
UN Women Asia-Pacific WEPs Awards (2021) hosted a splendor award ceremony virtually to honor all the award-winning organizations where young leader Ms. Tawhida Shiropa (Founder & CEO of Moner Bondhu) has accepted the award at a virtual award ceremony on 18 November, 2021. Planned as an annual event, the UN Women Asia-Pacific WEPs Awards is the first awards initiative in the region to recognize exemplary business practice for gender equality aligned to the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs). The WEPs Awards offer a unique opportunity for business leaders and companies to be recognized and make their efforts to advance gender equality visible amongst their customers, employees and partners, as well as inspire others to take action for wider impact.
The Asia-Pacific Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Awards celebrates youth leaders who have made significant contributions to promoting gender equality in the workplace, marketplace and/or community. This is the first time an organization from Bangladesh has won this prestigious award from UN Women in the Youth Leadership category. This special category recognizes youth leaders who have made significant contributions to promoting gender equality in the workplace, marketplace and community.
As a youth Leader, Moner Bondhu’s founder and CEO developed accessible and affordable mental healthcare services to thousands of women beneficiaries to advance gender-equality, initiated gender actions to lead her company towards becoming a more gender-inclusive workplace and creating a more gender-inclusive supply-chain. Ms. Shiropa expressed her tremendous gratitude, sharing, “I strongly believe in equality and equality means impactful business. Being a young leader, I always pursue a strong focus on intergenerational and youth engagement to advance gender equality. From our services to awareness building tools, from our clients to staff, we adopted a gender-inclusive approach everywhere. And the outcome was this award. This is an achievement not only for Moner Bondhu, but also for Bangladesh. This award will show the world how Bangladeshi youth organizations are doing impactful business and promoting gender equality at the same time. We are extremely happy that we made our country proud. Bangladesh will be the pioneer of establishing equality in business with our hands.”
Moner Bondhu is a mental healthcare and wellbeing platform in Bangladesh working since 2016 towards SDG 3.4 to provide accessible and affordable mental healthcare to all. With their experienced and certified psycho-social experts, advocates and mental health workers, they have provided in-person and online counseling services to 31,000 clients, reached 12,00,000 people through workshops, training, awareness-based campaigns and served 40,00,000 people online for the past 5 years.
