Through his organization, Social Development Initiative (SDI) Academy, Sazzad has built a community of empowered migrant workers with stronger professional prospects by leveraging English language instruction to navigate safely and effectively in a foreign environment and to access growth opportunities. SDI Academy blends digital media, in-person training, and rigorous data collection to design and deliver high-quality courses which up-skill immigrants and help them assimilate into the mainstream. Most notably, SDI Academy launched the SDI Academy app, an e-learning platform with speech recognition AI technology to enable language learning at scale.

In this interview, we talk about Sazzad’s motivation in the space, the missed opportunity in serving the migrant worker and other invisible communities, and his thoughts on how to build services for communities we are very different from.