10 Dynamics To Benchmark around BRAC - the world's most purposeful and collaborative network

[chris macrae]

No network of partners has ever empowered more people to end community poverty more successfully than BRAC - what are top 10 magic moments to action learn about BRAC

1 Out of an emergency, became the world's first bottom-up NGO led by an exponential chartered accountant

2 Has always seen end poverty as about empowering bottom -up education  and breaking generations of village illiteracy-

adopted the action learning ideology of Paulo Freire

with the world's least resourced government unable to offer primary schooling in rural areas, BRAC convinced the world to fund village primary schools (Montessori Type); it designed these schools to be an order of magnitude more efficient than state schools in big cities; it franchised both curriculum and teacher behaviours in ways that celebrated joy of learning; the world's most efficient end illiteracy curriculum (both for parents and children) became its first sustainable business model

3 BRAC's biggest fastest scaling up of a knowhow networking franchise was connected around oral rehydration- the tens of thousand trainers of village mothers it connected acriss rural bangladesh stayed on as para-health workers- their sustainabie business models retailing the most basic pills and health advice - BRAC has always been searching for 10 times more frugal healthcare and community services  see lancet special issue on brac ; see its frugal summit series

4 BRAC was the first to consciously go sector by rural market sector and redesign the whole value chain to sustain poorest, smallest (farming) businesses but in high quality ways - see its world class innovations in bottom-up crop science, poultry, beef and diary. In crop science knowhow it formed a triad with Nippon Institute in Japan and Borlaug alumn. Its only in the 2010s that the transparency of bottom up value chain modeling has come to either USAID or the World Bank. The problem being that in the 1980s Harvard professors published value chain theory around top-down externalisation models- their ideology was programeed into spreadsheeting numbers. In this they embedded the least community sustaining algorithms worldwide - compare this with value exchange models that the economist Kenneth Boulding had urged American secondary school teachers to make fundamental to systems literacy in the 1960s.

5 From the start BRAC published microentrepreneur research - lessons of what failed as well as what worked It debriefed all its funding partners continuously -microfanchise small (efficient and effective open model) then scale large. It developed a culture of offensive, open and entrepreneurial bottom-up aid celebrating very way that this is opposite from how failed systems emerge when:

aid is defensive not publishing mistakes at earliest possible time to learn, and administered around top--down adminsitration

6 The biographer of Steve Jobs claims his genius involved connecting multiple market sectors that had been separately strategised before the age of connectivity. Actually both BRAC and Grameen linkedin grassroots connectivity before technology was ready to multiply life critical knowhow. Both design bottom up financial service circles of village mothers round fusion of at least 4 sectors:

bottom-up value chain design

education

increasing health before taking out a loan to maximise personal and communal productivity

financial services

People who fail to map the synergies between the way BRAC and Grameen scaled do endless harm to the every curriculum : microbanking, microeducation, microhealth, microvalue chains.

For example Grameen''s 16 decision culture of every centre of 60 villagers famously committed every village mother to sending children to primary school. But the schools across rural bangladesh only existed because of what BRAC scaled. Ultimately by the mid 1990s the grassroots "social networking" structures of both Grameen and BRAC involved hundreds of thousands of village circles communally regenerating village sustainability around maximum of 60 mothers per circle

7 Both Grameen and BRAC had made the barefoot village banker the most trusted adviser -ensuring at least weekly visits to every village circle. What was being embedded was the most life critical social networking infrastructure. While it was Grameen that first mobilised the telecommunications connectivity of this - BRAC's personal advisers by early 1990 for every villager had added para-legal advisers - in other words BRAC was more deeply advanced into protecting the property rights of villagers (cf the argument of De Soto)

8 Sir Fazle Abed trained in Glasgow as an architect before he became a chartered accountant. he liked to map on paper before digitalising. So BRAC was definitely slower in testing mobile connectivity as integral to the global village networking age. However this had an advantage. When microeditsummit started in 1997 it failed to query the tipping point between:

manual and digital trust networks of banking

manual and digital connections of education infrastructures

bottom up value chain design.

While BRAC and Grameen had both scaled enough to attract investment in going digital many of the microcredit manual replicates in other countries were not in such a position to leverage/empower grassroots networking scale. This is the most fundamental problem impacting the The vast majority of microcredit models to lose their way during the race to 2015 millennium goals.  While DR Yunus challenged the world of globalising business to partner inmobilising  practical village lab tests, BRAC focused first on integrating hi-trust banking at every level a developing nation needs:

the rural microcredit banks (phase 1 manual)

the rural microcredit banks (in a digital age)

the connection between hi-trust urban banking for poorest and rural banking for poorest

the connection of cashless e-banking

the connection of an association of global banks with values around the world

9 Grameen had from the mid 1980s celebrated dialogue roundtables aboyt three tiemns a year where people who wanted to try and replicate grameen in their own countries could come and action learn. Partly because the BRAC model is so much more interdependent with developing a nation's education - it did not see how to become a multinational knowhow connector until lessons were learned around the world from the first exponentially increasing decade  (19996-2005) connection of the internet linking in every human being (citizen or villager). BRAC's international development since mid 2000s has been with the most trusted partners -search both its global connectors and its local cultural connections with muslims for good.

10 As the 2010s scale open education, the opportunity is to celebrate all the most collaborative curricula of bottom up development noting the correlation between the social movements of end poverty and twining youth job creation out of every capital with a future. It is to be hoped that the most open education platforms such as khan academy find ways to source microfranchise module content both from BRAC and Grameen. If these 3 Bangladeshi-cultured networks can win-win-win they can help worldwide youth change every broken system that became to top-down during tv advertising's age.

[chris macrae]

alternative summary 

 jim kims 2 social movements #2030now and world youth summits

but which is the most connecting curriculum of all of this ; if millions of youth were to viralise 9 minute action learning nuggets replicating khan academy type platform  (as Dr Yunus prayed for at 2013 skoll ) what is the 42 year pro-youth economics storyline they need to benchmark first of how bottom up networking ends poverty

 

I suggest these 10 interconnecting ideas from BRAC's brillian trials and tribulations are worth knowing about- by all means add in other practice areas- eg when it comes to micro-up energy nancy wimmer knows exactly how grameen scaled; sarah butler-sloss and prince charles celebrate microenergy solutions so joyfully that they have even changed the BBC's and Royal Geographic Society and British Consumer editorial policy on climate and energy; ted turners daughter is tasked with ensuring that if nothing else the billion dollars te turners have spent on the un foundation connect clean sustainable solutions

10 Dynamics To Benchmark around BRAC - the world's most purposeful ...

No network of partners has ever empowered more people to end community poverty more successfully than BRAC - what are top 10 magic moments…? We'd vote for these 10- how about you?

 

1 bottom-up disaster relief designed out of epicentre of 500000 killer cyclone by Chartered Accountant of the Shell Multinational and Glaswegian graduate of civil engineering 

2 disciple of experiential learning education -of paulo freire and of village vocational schooling of Montessori-Gandhi (sir fazle also connects Freire with Popper's open society curriculum in exactly opposite ways to the mindset Jeffrey Sachs was taught by Harvard to impose -Bolivia,, Poland, Russia, Millennium Villages - see biography of The Idealist) 

3 healthcare para-networkers first 10000 barefoot professional network to scale thanks to need to collaborate around oral rehydration to save fifth of infants lives (thereby also reducing need for mothers to breed 9 children) to see where this led to browse special 2013 issue of The Lancet on Bangladesh's most economical healthcare in the world  -note this is the opposite way round system design to UN networkers spreading cholera across Haiti -

4 consciously go sector by rural market sector and redesign the whole value chain to sustain poorest,  linkedin worldwide triad with japan's nippon institute and JIca and alumn of Borlaug

5  From the getgo BRAC published microentrepreneur research - lessons of what failed as well as what worked It debriefed all its funding partners continuously -microfanchise small (efficient and effective open model) then scale large.

6 The biographer of  Steve Jobs claims his value multiplying genius involved converging multiple market sectors that had been separately strategised before the age of connectivity. Actually both BRAC and Grameen linkedin grassroots connectivity before technology was ready to multiply life critical knowhow. Both design bottom up financial service circles of village mothers round fusion of at least 4 sectors:

bottom-up value chain design

education

increasing health before taking out a loan to maximise personal and communal productivity

financial services

People who fail to help youth map the synergies between the way BRAC and Grameen scaled do endless harm to the every curriculum : microbanking, microeducation, microhealth, microvalue chains.

For example Grameen''s 16 decision culture of every centre of 60 villagers famously committed every village mother to sending children to primary school. But the schools  across rural bangladesh only existed because of what BRAC scaled. Ultimately by the mid 1990s the grassroots "social networking" structures of both Grameen and BRAC involved hundreds of thousands of village circles communally regenerating village sustainability around maximum of 60 mothers per circle. 

7  Both Grameen and BRAC had made the barefoot village banker the most trusted adviser -ensuring at least weekly visits to every village circle. What was being embedded was the most life critical social networking infrastructure. While it was Grameen that first mobilised the telecommunications connectivity of this - BRAC's personal advisers by early 1990 for every villager had added para-legal advisers - in other words BRAC was more deeply advanced into protecting the property rights of villagers (cf the argument of De Soto)

 

8 Sir Fazle Abed trained in Glasgow as an architect before he became a chartered accountant, wheras Yunus trained as a macroeconomist out of van Der Bilt during first year of racial integration. Sir Fazle liked to map on paper before digitalising. So BRAC was definitely slower in testing mobile connectivity as integral to the global village networking age. However this had an advantage. When microeditsummit started in 1997 it failed to query the  future-now tipping points between:

manual and digital trust networks of banking

manual and digital connections of education infrastructures

bottom up value chain design.

While BRAC and Grameen had both scaled enough to attract investment in going digital many of the microcredit manual replicates in other countries were not in such a position to leverage/empower grassroots networking scale. This is the most fundamental problem impacting the The vast majority of microcredit models to lose their way during the race to 2015 millennium goals.  While DR Yunus challenged the world of globalising business to partner in mobilising  practical village lab tests, BRAC focused first on integrating hi-trust banking at every level a developing nation needs:

9 Grameen had from the mid 1980s celebrated dialogue roundtables about three tiemns a year where people who wanted to try and replicate grameen in their own countries could come and action learn. Partly because the BRAC model is so much more interdependent with developing a nation's education - it did not see how to become a multinational knowhow connector until lessons were learned around the world from the first exponentially increasing decade  (19996-2005) connection of the internet linking in every human being (citizen or villager). BRAC's international development since mid 2000s has been with the most trusted partners -search both its global connectors and its local cultural connections with muslims for good.

10  As the 2010s scale open education, the opportunity is to celebrate all the most collaborative curricula of bottom up development noting the correlation between the social movements of end poverty and twining youth job creation out of every capital with a future. It is to be hoped that the most open education platforms such as khan academy find ways to source microfranchise module content both from BRAC and Grameen. If these 3 Bangladeshi-cultured networks can win-win-win they can help worldwide youth change every broken system that became to top-down during tv advertising's age.