Sustainability Goals

[chris macrae]

1 Up to the end of 20th C, most extreme poverty has been rural. This has meant:

no electricity grids so no telecommunications or other modern ways of accessing knowhow including literacy, health, ..

no modern roads or transport connections

no running water or sewerage systems

Back in 1946, world war 2 had ended with vast areas of the eastern hemisphere stuck in such rural underdevelopment including many areas emerging from colonisation which had seldom transferred the health and wealth of the industrial age beyond key cities

In this context Bangladesh drew one of the shortest straws of all- when the British left India. East Pakistan as it was then called was left to be a colony of (West) Pakistan. With a war of Independence, Bangladesh at last became a free nation in 1971 but now much the poorest 100+ million person nation- devastated by war and with over 90% of the country in rural poverty and subject to nature's typhoons and floods. ( While China's race to end poverty is even more tumultuous in terms of numbers of people it should be noted that by the time Bangladesh was born expatriate Chinese were laready becoming the 3rd richest identity. So China's extraordinary development lessons come from plentiful inward investment funds; and while it is true that Bangladesh's development has also involved remittances, these have often been from hard labour eg where the region's cities have been buillt on such temporary immigrant visaa

It is in this extreme challenging context that Bangladesh's innovation to end poverty for a first pre-digital quarter century, and then from 1996 as the first rural space to experiment with mobile partnerships that curriculum of ending poverty starting from the least resources can be studied.

 In many ways rural Bangladesh became its own development space for what is now known as bottom-up development as Government services barely reached beyond City.  BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advance Committee was born a year after independence in 1972 -initially in a region where a typhoon killed half a million people and Sir Fazle then director of Shell's office became the centre of disaster relief. Over and Over Sir Fazle's teams built the most effective efficient expandable solutions out of the least resources

Communications systems did not make going international seem viable to BRAC until 2002 (starting in Afghanistan). As a testimony to the replicable microfranchises and ecosystems which BRAC connects and invites partnerships around, BRAC of the 2010s has become not just the biggest partnership NGO in the world but the most valuable to celebrate for open source of more poverty alleviation development and livelihood-connected education for disadvantaged youth- especially girls .

AMAZING GRACE

Bangladesh is the first 100+ million person nation mainly developed by women and their children. Today BRAC's sustainability investments in livelihood banks offers a benchmark across the whole value chain (village microcredit, Ultra Poor programs for those not yet sustaining income generation, a city bank with a large membership among children of village mothers including young ladies who extraordinary energy have made BRAC's garment industry a world leader, and the world's number 1 cashless bank www.bkash.com which uses mobile points accept for last mile conversion back to cash

3 Health

Search for videos explaining why womens gtetaests grassroots social network would not have developed without oral rehydration 

Discuss how many experiments were needed before BRAC found successful way to network village mothers capacity to delver oral rehydration to infants at risk of death by diarrhea- comment on brac's transparent approach to sharing its development research

which of these different healtb service economies started up brac

maternal and infant health

infectious diseases

chronic diseases

surgery after accidents, war or part of old age

[chris macrae]

In Bangladesh over a  million people died of famine around 1974 ; ever since BRAC has been a collaborative world leader in innovating different variants of rice optimalised to Bangladesh's diverse climates and lands

Compared with other staples like corn, rice is a rewarding local crop to grow (relatively few cost advantages to big producers). However it lacks eg vitamin A- making vegetable gardeing in the vilages vital for children's diets. BRAC found that seeds being marketed in the 1970s only had about 15% live components *85% duds). It took over leadership of the market for seeds by delivering over 85% live seeds.

Typically BRAC helped end poverty and malnutrition bu redesigning agricultural value chains so that it led a market sector (ed poultry, milk) in such a way that every component job of the value chain offered an income above the poverty line

The idea spread that Bangladesh enjoyed being a rural lab for world class solutions to ending poverty. Eg the American Paul Polak has helped innovate many solutions - the first of which was tradele pumps