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| The late Fazle Abed, BRAC's Founder |
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. Since those years BRAC has 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.
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| Shameran Abed, BRAC's International Executive Director |
In an interview with Shameran Abed who heads BRAC's international programmes, Abed said that Afghanistan was a big turning point. 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.”
BRAC - the Graduation Approach
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As someone who at the working level had a lot of interactions with BRAC during my four years managing UNICEF's Non formal education portfolio, must say, consistency and scale were two hallmarks, some other NGOs had more seemingly innovative educational technologies but were unable to sustain them managerially and financially. I think the term Social Corporation best describes BRAC, with an enterprise arm that cross subsidizes the social/educational work. During my 8 week stint with SCF at the Rohingya response --as one of two Education Cluster Coordinators, I noted that BRAC fielded a contingent of some 800 field workers with good representation from their Africa based teams. Dr.Abed's other contribution was to keep his organization out of Politics that fiery flame that drew some charismatic NGO folks to the flame. Wonder if it is still OK to speak of a BRACAVERSE...
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