Grameenphone has announced the winners of the second edition of FutureMakers, its competition for university students. The grand finale was held on Tuesday at the Radisson Blu hotel in Dhaka, on the theme "AI for Social Good".
More than 7,000 students from over 70 universities took part, submitting 1,103 concept papers across seven challenge areas: digital inclusion and education; healthcare and mental wellbeing; skills and employment; gender equality and inclusion; environment and climate response; security, safety and data privacy; and other AI applications.
First place: a clip that upgrades a stethoscope
Team LubDub won Tk 3 lakh for EcoClip, an AI-powered clip-on device that turns an ordinary stethoscope into a tool for detecting possible early signs of heart disease.
The team is Akib Ahmed Pratyay (Dhaka University), Raya Adiba Ahmed (BUP) and Shahriar Ahmed (BRAC University).
The design choice is the clever part. It does not ask a rural clinic to buy new diagnostic equipment or to have a cardiologist on site. It attaches to the instrument every health worker already owns and already knows how to place correctly — which is usually what decides whether a device gets used after the pilot ends.
First runner-up: warning people before the bank goes
Team River Sentinel took Tk 2 lakh for an AI system that predicts river erosion, identifies high-risk areas and issues early warnings to the people living there.
The team is Sakib Ul Hasan (DU-IBA), Abdullah Al Wahid (IUT) and Rukaiya Jahan (DU-IBA).
River erosion displaces thousands of families in Bangladesh every year, and the loss is close to total: a house that goes into the Padma or the Jamuna takes the land with it. Most flood systems warn about water arriving. Warning that the ground itself is about to go is a different and harder problem, and the value is measured in how much a family can carry out before it happens.
Second runner-up: speech therapy that continues at home
Team Jinxed won Tk 1 lakh for Project Spashto, an AI-assisted speech therapy app supporting home practice and progress tracking. The team is Oronno Ovoy, Al Din Noor Madhurjo and Rafid Ahsan, all of BUP.
Speech therapy works through frequent repetition, but Bangladesh has very few trained therapists and most families cannot attend often enough. An app cannot replace a therapist; what it can do is hold the practice together between the sessions that do happen, and show whether it is working.
Who was there, and what they said
The chief guest was Rehan Asif Asad, adviser to the Prime Minister on posts, telecommunications and ICT. The special guest was Maj Gen (retd) Md Emdadul Bari, chairman of the BTRC. Also present were the Norwegian Ambassador to Bangladesh, Håkon Harald Gulbrandsen, Grameenphone chief executive Yasir Azman, senior company officials and industry professionals.
Bari said young innovators are using AI with Bangladesh's own socio-economic conditions in mind — a reading the three winning projects support, since none of them is a general-purpose tool looking for a local use.
Winners also get direct access to Grameenphone's talent programmes, including the Next Business Leader development programme and the Nexter internship.
