When Tamzid, now 17, was a sophomore in high school, a classmate who was a cancer patient needed an emergency blood transfusion. Despite the frantic efforts by the school and family to find a donor, the friend sadly passed away. In Bangladesh, where only 1.3% of the population donates blood and 55,000 people die annually due to lack of access to blood transfusions, Tamzid, a cancer survivor himself, decided to establish a system that connects recipients with donors to prevent such tragedies.

Bloodlink Foundation, launched with the involvement of the Health Ministry, ICT Ministry, UNDP, the government, and many other stakeholders, has created a blood matching system that has saved over 1,200 lives to date. He is planning to deploy a “smart blood donation case system” to 16,000 hospitals, aiming to cover all the 1.3 million blood transfusions cases in Bangladesh.