BRAC’s the way

[Gunnar Larson]

BRAC’s the way

The backstory to BRAC, a humanitarian NGO touching the lives of 120 million
worldwide, is a fascinating journey borne from the rubble of Bangladesh’s
liberation war more than 50 years ago. My colleague Omar Mohammed writes
how it transformed from a cash-strapped, one-nation charity into a
sprawling multinational that could serve as a blueprint for development
organizations the world over.

Fazle Abed, a British-educated naval architect and accountant, was so
horrified by the war that turned millions of his countrymen into refugees
that he left the private sector, sold his apartment in London, and returned
home to build BRAC — then known as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance
Committee.

Omar spoke to Shameran Abed, BRAC International’s executive director, about
the founder’s legacy and how it’s continued to grow after his death in 2019.

Afghanistan was a big turning point, Abed said. Near the end of 2001, once
American troops had toppled the Taliban-led government, BRAC’s leadership
heard stories that mirrored what had happened in Bangladesh — with
Afghanistan’s infrastructure destroyed, the education system in tatters, a
collapsed economy, and millions of refugees clamoring to return home.

BRAC could help. Its work in Bangladesh meant it could provide the
expertise to rebuild education systems and health structures and provide
financial services for people in postwar Afghanistan. This also suggests
that BRAC’s model could be tested elsewhere.

BRAC now operates in 10 countries across Africa and Asia and plans to push
into as many as 20, Abed said.

“Our theory of change is a relentless pursuit of scale,” he told Omar. “We
don’t want to do things small. We don’t want to do things on the edges, and
we don’t want to do things that look good, that are impactful, but only in
very small doses and can’t be scaled.”

Read: Does BRAC offer a different model for development organizations?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 2063 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20230717/a2d910ec/attachment.txt>