Abed Fazle H.
Organization: BRAC
Year Founded: 1971
Country: Bangladesh
Website: www.brac.net
Geographic Area of Impact: Afghanistan,Bangladesh,Sri Lanka,Sudan,Tanzania,Uganda .
Model: Hybrid Non-Profit ,Social Business
Focus: Culture/ Handicrafts,Education,Enterprise Development,Financial Inclusion,Health,Rural Development,Women.
Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum Video Interview Audio Interview The Innovation BRAC, the former Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, is one of the most widely studied non-governmental organizations in the world. For three decades, it has been fighting poverty, illiteracy and child mortality, and supporting women's health and development on a massive scale in rural Bangladesh. BRAC mobilizes the latent capacity of the poor to improve their own lives through self-organization. BRAC’s full-time staff of 28,000 has helped 3.8 million poor women establish 100,000 village organizations. BRAC's health programmes reach 10 million people; its non-formal schools cater to 1.2 million children (of which 70% are girls) and its micro-credit programme has disbursed US$ 1.8 billion in loans with a reported 98% repayment rate. BRAC is now working with Afghanistan to support their reconstruction efforts. Background In 1970, Bangladesh was hit by a cyclone that killed 225,000 people. The following year, the country fought its War of Liberation, in which more than a million Bangladeshis were killed. The country lay devastated. Millions, especially those in remote areas bordering India, had lost all means of survival. When Fazle Abed, then an executive in a multinational corporation, returned to Bangladesh, he encountered widespread poverty and disease—and an inefficient, corrupt government wholly unequipped to respond to the country's problems. Abed resolved to apply his knowledge of management techniques and accountability mechanisms to the task of rebuilding his country from the grassroots. Strategy BRAC introduced many pattern-setting ideas in development, such as segmenting groups into different target markets and designing customized programmes for separate client groups. BRAC’s clients monitor and evaluate programmes themselves, as well as conduct systematic research and development. In so doing, BRAC identified backward and forward market linkages needed to boost economic opportunities for the poor. For example, when BRAC found that poor women were not profiting from rearing milking cows, it improved the breed of cow (a backward link) and set up a modern dairy (a forward link). Above all, BRAC helped shift the global development paradigm from that of helping 'needy beneficiaries' to 'encouraging villagers' self-development, particularly among women. Abed had seen prior development programmes fail because they were run by state functionaries rather than by the clients themselves. BRAC's programmes today address problems such as unemployment, poor health and education, environmental hazards and gender inequality. BRAC's campaign to disseminate oral rehydration therapy (for diarrhoeal disease) played a major role in halving Bangladesh's infant mortality rate in the 1980s. The Entrepreneur Fazle Hasan Abed comes from an affluent family in Bangladesh. When war broke out with Pakistan, Abed was in his thirties. The war had a profound impact on him. He left his job as a corporate executive at Shell Oil in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and went to London, where he devoted himself to the war of independence from there. He returned to a devastated Bangladesh, which was suffering from the after effects of war and cyclonic destruction. Millions of refugees were returning from India. In 1972, he moved to a remote area in northeastern Bangladesh to focus on relief and rehabilitation efforts. This was the beginning of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and Abed never looked back. "The driving force behind BRAC is a belief that the people of Bangladesh do not have to remain poor," says Abed. "They can change their destiny if empowered to do so."
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