HAPPY 80th BIRTHDAY – Sor Fazle Abed, BRAC, Bangladesh
45 Years of Building the Most Valuable Network on
Sustainability Youth’s Planet
1 RESILIENCE NOT JUST RELIEF –INNOVATION’s
CORE OF BOTTOM-UP DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
The seeds of BRAC were planted in the efforts of Sir Fazle
and friends to assist families affected by the Brola cyclone in 1970. BRAC was
then officially established after independence, supporting refugees to rebuild
their lives. At a critical early juncture , we abandoned our focus on relief
and adopted a longer-term objective of development, opting to work side by side
with community members for decades to come.
We do not ignore emergencies and their impact on people
living in poverty. We build community preparedness and grassroots platforms
that activate in natural disasters to minimize damage and to channel relief.
Our goal is to help households bounce back better.
Better often means changes such as stronger infrastructure
or new livelihoods for families that depend on agriculture, for example, and
are therefore increasingly vulnerable to climate change.
As Bangladesh
urbanizes, we have expanded our focus to include manmade disasters like fires
and building collapses, most recently Rana
Plaza
Massive natural disasters internationally have triggered us
to expand into new countries like Haiti
and Nepal to
support national recovery the way we did in Bangladesh
so many years ago
2 Healthy Lives and healthy futures
Doctors and hospitals were scarce in Bangladesh ’s
early days. We created an army of community-based entrepreneurs to bring
medicine to every doorstep. Over time, the army became all female, challenging
social norms and enabling women to access important products and information
We challenged the global health community by putting the
life saving treatment for diarrheal disease in the “unqualified” hands of
mothers, and generated evidence that they could use it effectively. We created
a community-based tuberculosis control model, expanding over time to become the
government’s largest partner in combating the disease.
The growing numbers of people living in poverty in urban
areas face serios health risks, including maternal and infant mortality. Our
network of healthcare entrepreneurs continues to ensure that women can access
care safely, quickly, and with dignity.
Recent breakthroughs in cognitive science have shown that
focusing on early childhood development has transformative effects over a
lifetime. Pilot programmes are putting this research into action at the
grassroots level
The primary challenge of healthcare now is less about access
and more about quality. We are building
financial tools to continuously ensure more people can access services that
meet their evolving health needs.
3 EDUCATION FROM LITERACY TO LEADERSHIP
We started by teaching basic literacy to adults, then
realised we needed to start from the start.
We changed lour nor-formal primary schools as “second chances’ for
people living in poverty especially girls. Our pedagogy focused on joyful
learning, incorporating the best practices from around the world.
As students graduated from our schools. We felt a need for
creative ways to continue learning beyond the classroom. Libraries offered
reading materials, and adolescent clubs created safe spaces and opportunities
to teach life skills.
Our focus moved towards quality, with universal access
towards education in sight, through strategies such as teacher training and
increased use of technology. We proactively recruited students with special needs
and expanded our curriculum into multiple ethnic languages to ensure that our
schools were successful to all children.
Our ultiimate goal is to build a nation, and for that we
need leaders. That is where our focus is now – creating opportunities for youth
to take responsibilities in programmes, as mentors, and as teachers themselves.
Our university creates even more opportunities to contribute on a global scale.
4 Financial Inclusion
We started by bringing people living in poverty together. We
quickly learnt that what they needed most urgently was access to economic
opportunities and financial services.
We brought women together into village organizations to
organize credit and savings arrangements, and then used these meetings as a
platform by delivering a wider range of services.
Over time, we expanded our reach to unserved populations,
such as the “missing middle” (enterprises that were too large for the loans
offered by microfinance but excluded from commercial banks) and a comprehensive
grants based programme for people living with poverty, who could not benefit
from microfinance.
We are now building a broader set of financial products,
including insurance and pensions, and leveraging the growing ownership of
mobile phones to use digital channels for financial services.
5 Market Solutions for the Poor
A fundamental driver is a lack of power – at the individual,
household and community level alike... Power dynamics need to change in order
for people living in poverty to realize their potential , and they only change
when people do it themselves.
We promoted consciousness raising and empowerment from our
earliest interactions with communities, inspired by teachings on social
movements. We underestimated the complexity of power dynamics though and
learned the hard way that we needed to create new organisations, where women
could come together in solidarity. These community action groups became
important social platforms; for example, supporting health workers who faced
harassment for their services.
We widened our work over time to help people living in
poverty to participate in formal government structures and leverage public
services. We also increased our engagement with public official and village leaders
to build wider support for women’s empowerment. These discussions have risen to
the national level, where we advocate policies that support gender equality and
human rights. Internally we have worked to build a female-friendly work
environment and actively strive to recruit women.
Gender equality remains one of the greatest unfinished works
of our generation, and an area in which we have to continue changing power
dynamics. We still see that child marriage is the norm, sexual violence is
pervasive, and women are under-represented in the workforce.
6 Changing Power Dynamics
As we began to provide financial services to people living
in poverty, we noticed that many rural communities did not have access to
markets
We started building value chains, connecting thousands of
farmers and artisans to national markets. We focused on silk, poultry, clothing
and retail, in many cases the viability of new sectors in Bangladesh .
The successful scaling up of one value chain often spawned new livelihood
opportunities, from poultry vaccinations to artificial insemination for dairy
cows.
Entrepreneurship is also a long standing part of our
development approach. Over time we have built a national cadre of local change agents, usually women, who
receive training and support from us, but are paid for their services by their
neighbours. These grassroots entrepreneurs distribute a wide variety of
products and services, from sanitary napkins to high quality seeds.
As local and global labor markets offer new opportunities.
We are supporting migrants to seek and finance work abroad safely, and equip youth with in-demand skills
7 BRAC INTERNATIONAL
By 2002 we had over 30 years experience of piloting and
perfecting programs, and scaling them to reach millions. The time had come to
bring what we had learnt in Bangladesh
to the rest of the world.
Relief and rehabilitation were immediate needs after war and
natural disasters plunged millions into poverty in Afghanistan
and Sri Lanka .
We focused on peace and building stability through jobs, education and
financial inclusion, continuing to put girls and women at the centre of
opportunities.
We expanded into Africa four years
later, starting development programs in Tanzania
and Uganda . We
continued to pilot, perfect and scale rapidly never losing focus on
contextualising every opportunity created
Opening now in 12 countries gives us a rich knowledge base
to further our work in Bangladesh ,
while providing us with a global network in which to pilot new solutions for
the world’s problems. In 2016, we create opportunities for one in every 50 people
in the world.
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