in our view the greatest education colaborations built from nothing linkin round brac- here is the 80th birthday topline
(purpose) report on brac and sir fazle's work issued by BRAC in Dhaka Bangladesh
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 in 2013.
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.