Bangladeshi founder, academic, and healthcare innovator Ahmed Sajidan Jarjis Rafsan has received major international recognition after ApexStride Systems was named World Champion and Global Grand Prize winner at the Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge in the United States.
ApexStride, founded by Rafsan, is being developed as a global MedTech innovation, health systems consulting, and implementation research platform emerging from Bangladesh for the wider Global South.
Its work connects Bangladesh, Caribbean Island communities, and South American research and policy contexts through climate-adaptive healthcare, resilient medical infrastructure, rehabilitation technology, digital health, and community-centered systems design.
According to the organizations, Rafsan’s combined work through ApexStride Systems and the Shirin Sajmila International Foundation has impacted nearly 1 million people across more than 20 countries through disaster response, rehabilitation, refugee support, women’s dignity, maternal and neonatal health, prosthetic care, education, climate resilience, and emergency medical operations.
ApexStride began with a deceptively simple question: can healthcare technology survive the real conditions of a patient’s life?
In flood-prone, high-humidity, low-resource regions, medical devices fail not only because of design limitations, but because roads collapse, follow-up systems disappear, electricity is unstable, water damages equipment, infection spreads, and patients are forced to carry the burden of broken systems.
Rafsan’s answer is ApexStride: a platform designing climate-adaptive prosthetics, medical devices, digital health systems, biomedical lifecycle infrastructure, rehabilitation pathways, technician training, patient tracking systems, and implementation research models for the places most excluded from conventional medical innovation.
The Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge, hosted by the University of San Diego, brings together social innovators from around the world.
ApexStride emerged as global champion among teams representing more than 25 countries, receiving $25,000 in prize funding for its model of climate-adaptive mobility and healthcare innovation.
Rafsan said the recognition marks a larger shift in how Bangladesh can be understood within global innovation.
“Bangladesh is too often described only as a country vulnerable to climate disaster. I want to show that Bangladesh can also become a source of the global healthcare systems, biomedical technologies, and humanitarian infrastructure that the climate-affected world will need,” he said.
ApexStride’s first major technical focus was climate-adaptive prosthetics through their state-of-the-art biomedical innovation lab.
Its mobility systems have been designed for patients whose daily realities include humidity, water exposure, mud, sweat-related skin injury, road trauma, workplace injury, diabetes-related amputation, uneven terrain, and weak follow-up care.
The platform has expanded beyond prosthetics into medical-device lifecycle systems, digital registries, hospital-readiness consulting, rehabilitation engineering, diagnostic infrastructure, and resilient health systems design across the Global South.
Rafsan also leads the Shirin Sajmila International Foundation, a US-registered 501(c)(3) humanitarian and health systems organization named in memory of his late mother and sister. SSIF’s work spans South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, and other vulnerable contexts, with programs in flood medicine, trauma care, maternal and neonatal support, menstrual dignity, refugee rehabilitation, disability education, prosthetic support, emergency logistics, and climate resilience.
The organization has supported prosthetic users, trauma survivors, refugee families, children with cancer, displaced women, adolescent girls, Indigenous artisans, climate-affected mothers, disaster-affected communities, and young people facing psychological crisis.
Its programs include post-flood medical camps, maternal and neonatal health support, menstrual dignity systems, prosthetic rehabilitation, emergency logistics, refugee trauma support, Indigenous economic resilience through Project Aranaya Kala, adolescent mental-health interventions, disability education, and field-based humanitarian operations across South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
During major flood responses in Bangladesh, SSIF supported 50,000 stranded families with rescue coordination, food, clean water, emergency medicines, mobile medical teams, and post-flood health camps.
Its medical operations addressed waterborne disease, malnutrition, maternal health, glucose monitoring, hemoglobin screening, neonatal oxygen saturation checks, emergency referrals, and field triage.
In Egypt, SSIF supported refugee rehabilitation efforts for Sudanese and Syrian communities, including medical and financial assistance for refugee children with cancer.
In Nepal, the organization helped mobilize a large trauma-counseling network involving psychologists and psychiatrists.
Through Project Aranaya Kala, SSIF has worked with Indigenous communities to connect cultural preservation, women’s livelihoods, natural dye systems, digital market access, and decentralized economic resilience.
Rafsan said ApexStride grew directly from the failures he witnessed in humanitarian fieldwork.
“In many communities, healthcare fails not because one device is missing, but because the entire chain around the patient collapses. Roads fail, hospitals become unreachable, follow-up disappears, devices break, infection spreads, and families are left alone. ApexStride is being built to address that whole system,” he said.
Beyond ApexStride and SSIF, Rafsan is involved in clinical and computational research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, where his work focuses on translational oncology, molecular data systems, diagnostic precision, and precision health infrastructure for resource-constrained settings.
He also co-leads Caribbean Studies Lab, an interdisciplinary humanities research platform working across Caribbean and diaspora studies, island vulnerability, climate precarity, migration governance, public health, digital inequity, and community resilience. His academic work has been presented at the prestigious international conferences including the Caribbean Digital XII Conference organized by Yale University and the ALARI IV Continental Conference at Harvard University.
This wider intellectual architecture gives ApexStride an unusual profile. It is not only a MedTech venture and not only a humanitarian platform. It is an attempt to build a new operating system for Global South healthcare, one that connects field evidence, biomedical design, public policy, climate resilience, academic research, and institutional implementation.
Rafsan’s work has also been recognized through the Ole Cup entrepreneurship competition, the Zayed Sustainability Prize shortlist in the health category, winning the Projects for Peace award, first Bangladeshi to be a Bevisioners Fellow by Mercedes Benz and other international platforms.
The significance of ApexStride lies in its refusal to treat the Global South as a passive recipient of imported innovation.
Instead, the platform begins with the real physics of vulnerable lives: floodwater, heat, humidity, fragile roads, disability, interrupted care, under-maintained medical devices, and patients who cannot afford a single system failure.
Rafsan said his long-term vision is to position Bangladesh as a producer of world-class health systems knowledge.
“Climate adaptation is not only about shelters, embankments, or emergency relief. It is also about whether a mother can reach care, whether an amputee can walk after a flood, whether a newborn can receive oxygen, whether a patient can be followed after diagnosis, and whether health systems can survive the real conditions of people’s lives,” he said.
With ApexStride’s world-champion recognition, SSIF’s expanding multi-continental humanitarian footprint, and a growing research network across medicine, public policy, climate resilience, the Caribbean, and the wider Global South, Rafsan is building one of the world's most ambitious health innovation platforms.
“This is not only about helping people after a crisis,” Rafsan said. “It is about redesigning the systems that decide who survives the next one.”