Surjer Hashi Network (A health care social enterprise)

Surjer Hashi Network (SHN) has been operating a large number of clinics all over the country providing health and family planning services primarily to the poor and the ultra-poor people. Funded by USAID since 1997, the clinics continued to serve the poor for about two decades through several NGOs. The clinics were later consolidated and registered as Surjer Hashi Network (SHN) in 2018 as a not-for-profit entity with a mission to provide quality and affordable health services to all Bangladeshis having mother and child health care in its focus. When SHN started its journey as a social enterprise, registered under the Companies Act 1994, it inherited 369 clinics from the USAID supported NGO Health Service Delivery Project. Most of those clinics were established in locations where health services at that time were inadequate, characterized by lack of public as well as private healthcare providers. Over the decades, GoB service expansion and other NGO initiatives eventually necessitated the need for an optimization exercise by SHN, with the support of the Advancing Universal Health Coverage (AUHC) project of USAID. The exercise identified 134 clinics that could potentially help SHN to become financially sustainable in the future. SHN currently operates 134 clinics with an explicit mandate of achieving a double bottom line i.e. health impact by providing quality health services to the low-middle income group and meeting financial sustainability goals. To meet the growing demand for quality health care service among the urban poor, SHN has strategically realigned its focus to more of the low to middle income urban/peri urban population.