Strength in a sari

GROWING up in the throes of the Bangladesh Liberation War had a profound impact on Durreen Shahnaz from an early age.

The experience of watching her country struggle to get back on its feet in its early days of independence stirred up in the former investment banker and founder of the Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) a defiance never to yield to others' notions of what she could or could not do.

"We are all a product of the country and culture we grow up in," she tells The Business Times. Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan when she was born, and one of her first memories as a child was the war with West Pakistan that lasted for about nine months in 1971.

Her father was involved in the resistance movement in the war. Many of her cousins hid in her family home; boys were taken away and killed; girls were put in "rape camps". It was a trying period, not helped by the fact that after the war ended, the country was hit by famine and depended on foreign aid to survive. They were "being told by the World Bank, the multilaterals, the big powerful countries, how and…