archives of fazle abed - & yidan luminaries - have we missed a keynote lecture rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk - BRAC net, world youth community and Open Learning Campus2024-03-29T15:55:08Zhttps://bracnet.ning.com/forum/topics/yy?commentId=4777346%3AComment%3A102318&xg_source=activity&feed=yes&xn_auth=no
download - BRAC…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-10-25:4777346:Comment:1040022021-10-25T01:05:52.373Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
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<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://www.valuetrue.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/brac-the-citizen-building-organisation.docx">download - BRAC : The Citizen-Building Network</a></p>
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<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://www.valuetrue.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/brac-the-citizen-building-organisation.docx">download - BRAC : The Citizen-Building Network</a></p>
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<div><span><b><i> (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://valuetrue.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/worldrecordjobs.pptx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">map</a>) <em>special series on Bkash : </em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/9f504d1a-4204-461a-b847-d55825fa3c33/bKash_Builtforchangereport.pdf?MOD=AJPERES" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ifc (2016)</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/https://www.cgap.org/sites/default/files/Brief_bKash_Bangladesh_July_2014.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> cgap (2014)</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/https://www.bracbank.com/financialstatement/bKash%20Ltd..pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">brac audit feb 2017</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://dspace.bracu.ac.bd:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10361/8766/13104215_BBA.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y" target="_blank" rel="noopener">student intern report aug 2017</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/806951477994552999/pdf/109541-WP-Built-for-Change-FINAL-low-res-edited-0926-PUBLIC.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ifc 5 change cases 2016</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://research.brac.net/publications/rice%20biodiversity_book.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rice science</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://www.brac.net/brac-enterprises/item/899-brac-seed-and-agro-enterprise" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/https://www.newscurrents.com/nc1/subscriber/nc1_6444/644405.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2</a></i></b></span></div>
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<p><span>special feature </span><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://research.brac.net/reports/brac_bank_mehnaz+munshi.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>BRAC bank</span></a>: banking for Small Enterprises<span> - the least studied of 5 interconnecting ways BRAC finances women and youth empowerment, entrepreneurship and communities sustaining family sized businesses (other 4 bkash, microfinance plus, Ultra, international remitances hub in Netherlands) also various partnerships of the world's largest NGO network including global association of banks with values </span><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://research.brac.net/reports/Environmental_Guide.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>1</span></a></p>
<p><span>T</span>ranscript sources . <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://www.brac.net/sites/default/files/BRAC_education_info_English.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>edu</span></a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://fortune.com/2016/12/02/brac-fazle-hasan-abed-ngo/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>anti-poverty design</span></a> : latest <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/https://www.thedailystar.net/city/brac-founder-sir-fazle-hasan-abed-gets-lego-prize-2018-1561582" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>1400 play based dev centers</span></a> 80th birthday tributes <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/https://www.thedailystar.net/op-ed/economics/tribute-champion-the-deprived-1214476" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>sobhan</span></a> </p>
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<tbody><tr><td><span>T0</span> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200504154057/http://api.ning.com/files/ZKjpPX9gtzWm3-RZuJrO6RLoAlH0IQJxMTVW-AKgbBVQNU5WJy*IEZGiJ*Mv9P6AIgJeX06MwR41QDSuPdGN0RWWagagLDQy/3_Keynote_Abed_ENiprccchina2010.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span>International Poverty Reduction Center in China</span></a><br/>Poverty Reduction and Development Forum: Transforming Development Pattern and Poverty Reduction Beijing, 17 October 2010<br/>Address by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed KCMG Founder & Chairperson of BRAC Sharing the BRAC experience in Bangladesh and Beyond<p>Your Excellency, Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu Minister Fan, Director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation Chairperson of the Session: Ms. Renata Lok-Dessalien</p>
<p>Our interventions aim to achieve large scale, positive changes through economic and social programmes that enable men and women to realise their potential. The most important thing that we have learned about development – that people who are poor must participate in creating their own solution. They must be empowered and they need access to financial resources. Self-empowerment comes from the confidence and selfworth an individual feels. BRAC works to develop the capacities of the poor, particularly women as agents of change </p>
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</div> Parveen Sultana Huda https:…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-09-23:4777346:Comment:1035012021-09-23T04:04:34.764Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<div class="author-panel"><div class="field field--name-author-profile-profiles field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"><div class="profile profile--1860 profile--type--author-profile profile--is-default profile--view-mode--blog-teaser clearfix"><div class="field field--name-field-name field--type-string field--label-hidden field__item">Parveen Sultana Huda …</div>
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<div class="field field--name-author-profile-profiles field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__item"><div class="profile profile--1860 profile--type--author-profile profile--is-default profile--view-mode--blog-teaser clearfix"><div class="field field--name-field-name field--type-string field--label-hidden field__item">Parveen Sultana Huda <a href="https://www.inclusivebusiness.net/ib-voices/story-brac-biggest-collaborative-social-business-bangladesh" target="_blank">https://www.inclusivebusiness.net/ib-voices/story-brac-biggest-collaborative-social-business-bangladesh</a></div>
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-main-text field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Parveen is one of the widely recognized professional of Bangladesh with 23+ years of experience in the Human Resources and Project Management fields with leading organizations both as a professional and consultant. She is currently working for BRAC University's Centre for Entrepreneurship Development as a Project Manager to manage a 4 year project titled Digital RMG Factory Mapping - Bangladesh. This project is being funded by A Foundation and administered by BRAC USA. Parveen started her own consulting firm – Renaissance Consultants Ltd. – in 2006 and has so far provided HR Development; Management, Organizational Development, Project Management and Business Development support to various local and international clients. She has worked for some reputed foreign organizations including the Asia Indigenous People’s Pact Foundation (Thailand), British Council, RTI International (USA), PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, UK), Agro-Inputs Project (AIP funded by USAID’s Feed the Future program), ILO, GIZ (previously GTZ), ITC (International Trade Centre – Geneva), ActionAid Vietnam, ActionAid Pakistan, etc.</p>
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<div class="header-container"><div class="col1"><div class="field field--name-field-display-title field--type-string field--label-hidden field__item"><h1 class="page-title">THE STORY OF BRAC - THE BIGGEST COLLABORATIVE SOCIAL BUSINESS IN BANGLADESH</h1>
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<div class="col2"><div class="tags-container"><div class="field field--name-field-country field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"><span> </span><div class="field__item">Bangladesh</div>
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<div class="field field--name-field-region field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden field__items"><span> </span><div class="field__item">South Asia</div>
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<div class="field field--name-published-at field--type-published-at field--label-hidden field__item">9. Jun 2010</div>
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<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-field-main-text field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>BRAC is the largest collaboration network of social businesses in the world. It is reaching 110 million poor people annually through its health, education, and economic development programs. Today, the organization generates 80 percent of its $485 million budget from its wholly owned social businesses.<br/><br/>BRAC’s integrated health, finance, and education programs are active in 70,000 villages in all of the 64 districts of Bangladesh, reaching an estimated 75 percent of the entire population. Its health programs serve more than 92 million people, its microfinance programs assist more than 7 million borrowers, and its education programs reach more than 1.5 million children.<br/><br/>BRAC is an organisation that Fazle Abed originally funded from selling his London flat as he tranferred from working as an exceutive for Shell to founding BRAC soon after Bangladesh’s war-torn independence in 1973. Around 1980, funding was nearly 100% donors, and BRAC was pioneering the best (arguably at that time the only sustainable) social business privitization model. By the mid 1990s, BRAC had already reduced external funding to about 50%.<br/><br/>BRAC’s third of a century journey has progressed through nationwide market leadership of service economy domains such as these:<br/><br/><b>Healthcare Nurses,<br/>Schools,<br/>Crafts Markets,<br/>Milk and Cattle Industry,<br/>Poultry Industry,<br/>Silk Indutsry,<br/>Microcredit.</b><br/><br/>Wherever BRAC achieves market leadership its channels are what British author Alan Mitchell terms right-side up. In other words the channel is designed to be the lowest cost to serving, distributing, communicating and innovating with communities in most critical need of life-saving, empowerment or sustainability solutions. This is the opposite market system round from brand channels with ever increasing cost that have often propagated the subliminal imperialism of profit-extracting global corporations.</p>
<p><b>Goodwill Media Beginnings</b><br/><br/>Back in 1974, BRAC’s first social business began in media. It emerged from a printing press that supplied books and other printed materials to the organization’s schools and education programs. Owning a press was a way to cut printing costs and to reclaim the profits that the profit-extracting sector would have taken. It also enables BRAC to open up the future relevance of schools curricula and cultural evolution. From the outset, this business also provided jobs and valuable job training for BRAC’s members, serving the organization’s mission to alleviate poverty. In its first year of operation, the press made $17,400 in profits. In 2007, it was generating $340,000 in profits<br/><br/>How else did this third of a century transformation and serial social business journey happen? Here is an outline:<br/><br/><b>Village Nursing & Education</b><br/><br/>BRAC used the profits from its printing press business to pilot a novel oral rehydration program. The program was effectively a nonprofit public health program to teach parents how to make an electrolyte-rich fluid for children with diarrhea. The fluid prevents dehydration, which proves deadly to many millions of children in the developing world every year. BRAC initially trained 4,000 oral rehydration workers (ORWs) and then sent them out to educate some 30,000 families. Accurate and effective teaching was extremely important because if parents gave their children too much of the solution, the children could get even sicker. So BRAC rewarded the ORWs with a performance-based incentive system: The more each parent remembered, the higher the ORW’s salary. Over the course of 10 years, BRAC’s oral rehydration program reached 14 million of Bangladesh’s 19 million households. The program played a major role in halving the country’s infant mortality rates which had been as high as 20% among under 5’s, with government surveys showing that 70 percent of families in Bangladesh use BRAC’s oral rehydration solution to treat diarrhea<br/><br/>What BRAC planted at the grassroots became even more important to the rural sustainability of Bangladesh – and the lives of women and children - than its first life-saving product. Its start up involved embedding a female nurse and teacher in every village. Early on Fazle Abed has described how there is all the system and network design difference in the world when professionals are located in the villages. Their vocational rewards as most loved people in the community are more than money can pay for. Moreover, in BRAC vilages women started to be the bearers of the most valuable knowledge- a dynamic with extraordinary social impact.<br/><br/>Compare this social networking prospect with the opposite history of professionals who live in big cities and seeing the serviice of poor in vilages increasingly as a chore. One which over time their professional boesy demans more and more financial rewards to cater for, and where empowering flows of vital information through the village becomes an ever more distant impracticality.<br/><br/>Today’s nursing programs have elevated focus to such areas as<br/>MNCH Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health<br/>WASH Water and Sanitation Health<br/><br/>Door to door village nursing health service 70000 employees - 18 million households served<br/><br/><br/><b>AARONG: Rural Handicrafts markets To Schools & Microcredit</b><br/><br/>While the oral rehydration campaign was in full force, BRAC launched the social business of Aarong Craft Shops. Aarong helps 65,000 rural artisans market and sell their handicrafts and has become the most popular handicraft marketing operation in Bangladesh. Its brand is as fashionable as any a for-profit corporation can offer.<br/><br/>Using revenues from Aarong, BRAC began testing microfinance and primary education initiatives. When the oral rehydration campaign concluded in the 1990s, BRAC was ready to scale up its most successful microfinance and education programs. In just over a decade, BRAC along with Grameen had innovated a way of developing the most basic trilple-win of ending poverty that any village community can get : hi-trust bankers, nusrses and teachers.<br/><br/>And as for Aarong its annual sales have reached BDT 1,980 million (USD 28.7 million).<br/><br/><b>Integrating Schools & BRACNet</b><br/><br/>BRAC’s Informal schooling system in 2007 has established : 20000 pre-primary, 32000 primary, 2000 secondary schools.<br/><br/>BRAC wanted to improve teacher training and curricula in its network of more than 50,000 one-room rural schools. The organization decided that high-speed Internet access was the best way to get information to teachers. Yet Bangladesh did not have nationwide high-speed coverage. So BRAC partnered with San Francisco- based gNet to create bracNet, which is building Bangladesh’s high-speed network from scratch. As with other BRAC-run social business, bracNet is expected to become a sustainable social business.<br/><br/>In actuality, BRAC has become the world’s best at privitization designed round social buisness modelling. Meanwhile, it has also cross-subsidised some of the above when grants were either not available or would have introduced non-microentrepreunial conditions by developing whole industry sectors within Bangladesh’s economy. Having no short-term owners it can afford to invest in sustainability’s longer but bigger investment in exponential development.<br/><br/><b>BRAC DAIRY: Integrated dairy Busnesses</b><br/><br/>In 1990, BRAC began making microloans to poor women who wanted to raise milk cattle. But when Abed met with one of the program’s borrowers, she revealed that she was having a hard time getting the milk to market, and that even when she could, she received only one-third of the price that milk sellers received in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. So in 1998 BRAC established the BRAC Dairy, which primarily purchases and markets the milk that its microlendees produce. To collect and process the milk for the dairy, BRAC has set up 80 milk chilling centers across Bangladesh. The BRAC Dairy and milk collection centers employ more than 500 people. In 2007, the project generated $1.15 million in surplus cash, which was enough not only to support the workers and dairy farmers, but also to expand operations. The BRAC Dairy is also becoming increasingly competitive with other Bangladeshi dairies: Its market share increased from 20 percent in 2006 to 35 percent in 2007.<br/><br/>BRAC created an artificial insemination (AI) program in 1998. BRAC operates one bull station and a network of 70 storage facilities across the country, training more than 1,000 AI workers. These workers not only deliver high-quality semen and inseminate cows, but also provide wrap-around services such as vaccination, pregnancy diagnosis, and calf delivery. BRAC pays the workers a fixed fee per insemination, which means that the more work the AI worker completes, the greater is his income. BRAC’s AI program generated $60,000 in profits in 2007. At the same time, it not only granted job skills and income to people across Bangladesh, but also supported the microentrepreneurs, dairy and chilling-center employees, and consumers—many of whom are also poor—further down the value chain.<br/><br/>BRAC sometimes preserves those that make outsized contributions to poverty alleviation. For example, some of BRAC’s milk-chilling stations are not collecting enough milk to break even in the near term. Yet the organization keeps the stations open because they are located in extremely poor areas that would suffer greatly from the removal of access to fair prices.<br/><br/><b>Integrate Broiler Processing</b><br/><br/>In Bangladesh, approximately 70% of landless rural women are directly or indirectly involved in poultry rearing activities. The poultry and livestock sector accounts for approximately 3% of the country's GDP . BRAC's poultry and livestock programme is composed of several components: poultry and livestock extension programme, poultry farms and hatcheries, feed mills, bull station, feed analysis and poultry disease diagnosis laboratories .The programme was started in the early eighties to protect poultry and livestock from disease by developing skilled village-level poultry and livestock extension workers (para veterinarians).We produce and distribute good quality day old chicks as well as poultry, cattle and fish feed. To date, 2.1 million people have been involved in this programme. The government has taken up our livestock development model for widespread implementation.<br/><br/><b>Integrated Silk Production</b><br/><br/>BRAC’s Sericulture programme in 2007 has built up to more than 7,500 silkworm rearers and 5,800 spinners. They have been engaged in producing a total of 212 metric tonnes of silk worm cocoons and 21 metric tonnes of raw silk.<br/><br/><b>Solar Social Business</b><br/><br/>BRAC Solar Energy Program for Sustainable Development was launched in December 1997. An integrated and multipurpose program, its projects spread across the country in a wide variety of settings including households,<br/><br/>BRAC and other NGO offices, training centers, schools, health clinics, cyclone shelters, a weather monitoring station, a government rest house and income generating centers such as carpentry, tailoring shops, cloth dyeing and printing shops, leather workshops, restaurants and grocery shops. stand- alone PV systems and wind turbines for solar electricity, Hot Box cookers and biogas plants have been installed in various regions throughout the country. In addition, the program has also installed 2 PV- utility interactive systems and 6 PV-wind turbine hybrid systems pioneering in Bangladesh. Projects with solar thermal micro-hydroelectric generators, biogas electricity and are soon be implemented.<br/><br/>With support from WB/GEF/GTZ/Kfw BRAC installed capacity 1.38 Mw( September , 2007) Stand alone Solar Home System to provide electricity in rural off-grid areas and served 26,600 beneficiaries.<br/><br/><b>Integrated Microcredit</b><br/><br/>BRAC has computerized its entire microfinance program so that it could more closely monitor all of its loans and curtail ineffective practices. At the heart of its banking businesses is one of Bangaldesh’s 3 mainstream rural microcredit programs. However at extremes it offers BRAC’s new Program for the Ultra- Poor, which currently serves 132,000 women. The focus group revealed that some of the poorest families in Bangladesh could not participate in BRAC’s microfinance program because they did not have the wherewithal to borrow and repay.<br/><br/>“They needed grants rather than loans,” says Abed. And so BRAC designed a program that would “hold the hands” of Bangladesh’s poorest 10 percent by giving them grants and stipends for the first two years of their participation, he says. Then, most of the clients “graduate,” becoming full-fledged microfinance borrowers.<br/><br/>Converselye for-profit BRAC bank in cities which has been recently IPO’d and is a stock market sucess for BRAC in somewhat the same way that Graemee’s early linkage with mobile telephiony has boosted its independence of funding.<br/><br/>Back on the social business track, another innovative BRAC microcerdit program connect teenage girls now serving 300,000+. This also neighbours one of its training programs: Legal rights training for women. There is also BRAC University. And BRAC research webs<span> </span><a href="http://www.bracresearch.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.bracresearch.org/</a><br/><br/>Then BRAC has the wherewithal as the world’s largest grassroots network employer to take on special projects such as Disaster relief & reconstruction after the 2007 cyclone as its latest annual reports show,<br/><br/>BRAC has also started to replicate internationally. One of its earlier and strongest replications is in Afghanistan.<br/>MC 179,000 ,members<br/>4854 schools<br/>3633 village nursing<br/>1390 poultry & livestock<br/><br/>Emerging replications with 2007 marking BRAC’s first full year of operations in<br/>Africa, with BRAC now working in Southern Sudan in addition to Tanzania and Uganda. In this short<br/>span of time, our programmes in Africa have experienced dramatic growth.<br/><br/>Tanzania<br/>MC 65,000<br/>400 nursing<br/>380 agriculture<br/>370 poultry and livestock<br/><br/>Uganda MC 48,000<br/>200 nursing<br/>122 learning centres in displaced peoples camps serving about 4000<br/><br/>S Sudan<br/>MC 4000<br/><br/>Next Sri Lanka, Pakistan<br/><br/>References:<br/><br/>1.<span> </span><a href="http://socialbusiness.tv/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/bracase.doc" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://socialbusiness.tv/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/bracas...</a><br/><br/>2.<span> </span><a href="http://www.lged-rein.org/database.php?pageid=66" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.lged-rein.org/database.php?pageid=66</a></p>
</div> Saturday, 24 October 2015 18:…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-09-01:4777346:Comment:1030492021-09-01T12:22:33.072Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<div class="catItemHeader"><span class="catItemDateCreated">Saturday, 24 October 2015 18:00</span><h3 class="catItemTitle"><a href="http://www.brac.net/speeches-presentations/item/721-sir-fazle-hasan-abed-world-food-prize-laureate-address">World Food Prize Laureate Address</a></h3>
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<div class="catItemBody"><div class="catItemIntroText"><p>Borlaug Dialogue Symposium<br></br>Des Moines, Iowa<br></br>16 October 2015</p>
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<p>"Thank you, Ambassador Quinn, World Food Prize Laureates,…</p>
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<div class="catItemHeader"><span class="catItemDateCreated">Saturday, 24 October 2015 18:00</span><h3 class="catItemTitle"><a href="http://www.brac.net/speeches-presentations/item/721-sir-fazle-hasan-abed-world-food-prize-laureate-address">World Food Prize Laureate Address</a></h3>
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<div class="catItemBody"><div class="catItemIntroText"><p>Borlaug Dialogue Symposium<br/>Des Moines, Iowa<br/>16 October 2015</p>
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<p>"Thank you, Ambassador Quinn, World Food Prize Laureates, distinguished guests and friends. It is appropriate that we are gathered in Iowa in October, in the middle of the harvesting season. Throughout this month, combines are rolling across the fields, here in one of the world's largest corn-producing regions.<br/><br/>In my native Bangladesh, where the main crop is rice, October, in the northwest of the country, has long been a time of chronic food shortage known as monga (M-O-N-G-A). Lasting about 60 days, monga is often referred to as a "season," as though it were a natural phenomenon, like the American autumn or the Asian monsoon. But it is a season defined only by widespread unemployment and hunger among the landless. It was long assumed to be a part of the enduring fabric of rural life in northwest Bangladesh. But today, we are starting to see the disappearance of monga and, in many places it has gone completely.<br/><br/>How has this happened? The answer is through the gradual adoption of new technology and a change in cropping patterns. We began working with farmers to alter the cropping pattern in a way that provides year-round employment to landless labourers. We did this by introducing a shorter-maturity rice variety for the summer rainy reason. A larger gap thus opened up between the two annual rice crops, long enough to allow cultivation of a third crop: the potato. Planting and harvesting potatoes during this period provides an extra 65 person-days of employment per hectare. Land that once yielded two harvests now produces three, and as a result, the monga season is close to disappearing.<br/><br/>We have thus succeeded in disrupting a pattern of suffering that had prevailed for centuries.<br/><br/>We can count many examples of methods that enable the poor to end poverty in their own lives, putting an end to cycles of suffering like the one I have just described.<br/><br/>One of these enabling tools is microfinance. BRAC began offering loans and savings services to the rural poor in 1974, when we were working in just one remote area of Bangladesh.<br/><br/>Wage employment was low, so we wanted participants in our development programs to have their own sources of income. We started making small loans to buy cows, seeds, farm tools, and other productive assets. These were offered as part of a package of services that included literacy and empowerment training, health care, sanitation, hygiene, and family planning.<br/><br/>Many of the women we worked with had a hand-to-mouth existence. They could only dream of having, say, 5,000 Bangladeshi taka, or about $100, to buy a cow. We created borrower groups in each village, thus removing two of the biggest constraints on poor people's ability to take control of their lives: a lack of resources, and a lack of solidarity among themselves.<br/><br/>Yet our borrowers faced many more problems trying to generate income from assets bought with micro-loans.<br/><br/>In 1991, I remember visiting a village in the north of Bangladesh that was about two miles on foot from the main road.<br/><br/>I spoke to a woman there, one of our microfinance borrowers, who was selling milk from the cow she had bought with her 5,000 taka loan. She told me the cow produced two liters of milk every day which she sold for 7 taka (about 15 cents) per liter.<br/><br/>She said, "I'm using that money to pay the loan back and, after that, I have no income."<br/><br/>I knew at the time that the price of milk in the capital, Dhaka, was 25 taka per liter. The demand for milk in our growing cities was enormous, and yet this woman had no way of accessing that market.<br/><br/>I thought, if we could collect milk from this woman, refrigerate it, and transport it to Dhaka, we could easily pay her 15 taka per liter -- roughly twice what she was getting at that time -- and still cover our costs.<br/><br/>This led to the establishment of the BRAC Dairy enterprise.<br/><br/>In order to improve services to livestock farmers, we have trained 400 paravets -- and set up a bull station to provide artificial insemination services, with bull semen from Friesian and others high-milk producing cattle. This is now being distributed through 3,000 trained inseminators throughout the country, equipped with a cell phone and a motorcycle, to provide artificial insemination services directly to farmers' home.<br/><br/>Bangladesh milk production is one a growth trajectory due to these services.<br/><br/>*<br/><br/>As the years went by, I found many examples like this where microcredit alone was not enough to boost incomes significantly. To help borrowers become more productive, we invested in training, inputs, and ways to get their goods to market.<br/><br/>We also encouraged people to develop multiple streams of income. We urged people to diversify, starting with small vegetable gardens alongside their homesteads. These supplemented their income and added nutrition to their diets. Many of our borrowers who produced vegetables for the market didn't have access to quality seeds so, in 1986, we launched our own vegetable seed production business and began producing high-quality seeds with the help of outside experts.<br/><br/>By the 1990s, microfinance in Bangladesh had grown quite large, driven by organizations like BRAC and Grameen Bank. Many clients were now using their micro-loans to buy and raise imported high-yielding varieties of chickens, which produced more eggs than regular domestic chickens. Over a two-year period, we trained 40,000 women in as many villages as poultry vaccinators, so they could provide provide regular vaccinations, using vaccines provided by the government, to the poultry rearers in their village.<br/><br/>Again, we faced constraints. This time it was a scarcity of quality poultry feed. In 1994, we began introducing hybrid maize seeds imported from Australia, so our farmers could grow maize for poultry feed.<br/><br/>It was quite a struggle to get Bangladeshi farmers to accept this idea. Maize was a new crop at the time and farmers weren't aware of the demand. So we offered them a buy-back guarantee. We told them, "If you grow our hybrid maize and can't sell it on the open market, we'll buy your harvest at a guaranteed price. You have no obligation to sell it to us; if you can find a buyer willing to pay more, by all means do so."<br/><br/>Farmers took us up on the offer, and the increased production of maize for poultry feed greatly benefited our poultry farmers. Maize is now an established crop in Bangladesh.<br/><br/>*<br/><br/>In 1998, our seed enterprise entered the market for our country's dominant crop, rice. We started importing hybrid rice seeds from China and field testing them for viability in different ecological zones. We now markets 12 varieties of hybrid rice in Bangladesh, including four developed at our own research center. This seed enterprise now generates a surplus of $1 million annually -- one of many similar enterprises that support our borrowers.<br/><br/>We are now working in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa, using self-employed local agents to extend similar solutions to farmers there.<br/><br/>There are those who say a nonprofit like BRAC should follow a purely charitable model rather than generating its own income, but I reject this. Today BRAC's social enterprises, including microfinance, generate revenue in excess of $600 million, with a net surplus of $150 million. Together with substantial donor funding, this funds our schools; our programs on maternal, neo-natal and child health and nutrition; water, sanitation and hygiene; human rights training and legal services; and many other programs.<br/><br/>Microfinance became one of our largest and most successful programs. But by the late 1990s, our field research showed that we still weren't reaching the poorest 10 per cent of Bangladesh's population. Even after 25 years of building rural livelihoods, we were failing to provide any significant opportunities to those most in need.<br/><br/>Millions of households at the very bottom were being systematically excluded from group-based microfinance. The group members, who were all poor women themselves, would not let the poorest women in the village join the groups. The members thought the poorest would not be able to regularly save and use loan capital to generate income.<br/><br/>We called them the “ultra-poor,” a sub-set of the extreme poor who lived on less than 80 US cents a day. They were mostly households headed by women, many of whom were widowed or abandoned.<br/><br/>We found the poorest do not take part in village life. Their children do not go to school. With their basic needs unmet, microfinance alone could not offer them a pathway out of poverty.<br/><br/>In 2001, BRAC developed a program tailored for the ultra-poor. We sought to address their multiple barriers to development simultaneously, hoping to give them a boost that “graduated” them from ultra-poverty.<br/><br/>Selected ultra-poor families receive a package of support: a cash stipend, a productive asset (such as a cow or half a dozen goats), training, a savings accounts, and basic healthcare.<br/><br/>This support period lasts 24 months. During this time, we make sure their children are able to go to school, encourage them to adopt savings habits, and coach them in the basics of financial management. Our staff pays regular visits to their homes for coaching and handholding to help them through any problems they may encounter. We involve others to get them into the mainstream life of the village.<br/><br/>The change that takes place in these women over these 24 months is remarkable. They begin to emerge from the darkness of poverty and hopelessness. It is as though a light has been switched on, and their lives begin to change in ways that far exceed what we put into the program. After years of suffering, it seems their hard work is finally gaining traction.<br/><br/>Since 2002, 95 percent of the 1.4 million families who have come through this program have graduated from ultra-poverty -- a 95 per cent graduation rate! -- and independent studies conducted by London School of Economics show that, even four years after members graduate, they continue to experience growth in their household income and improved well-being.<br/><br/>Success is not limited to Bangladesh. In May, Science magazine published the results of a large randomised control trial, conducted by researchers at Yale and MIT, covering pilots of similar graduation programs, based on BRAC's model but run by other NGOs in India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, and Peru. The results showed definitive success. In all six of the countries studied, treatment households saw significant improvements across a range of indicators that continued beyond the end of their programs.<br/><br/>So these graduation programs seem to work in all cultures -- not just Bangladesh.<br/><br/>I have compared people's realisation of their own power to change the world around them to a light being turned on -- the light of hope. It is a light that all people have within them, even those who may seem lost in darkness.<br/><br/>Time and again, we find examples like these, where poor people are able to harness their own energy and change their own lives, once we create the enabling conditions for them to do so.<br/><br/>To break the inter-generational cycle of poverty, BRAC opened its first schools for the children of the poor in 1985. One of our main objectives was to ensure quality, because these children, deprived of home learning opportunities, needed the best education they could get.<br/><br/>I remember reading an article in the Times Education Supplement about where the best teaching was taking place. It said that the Dutch were the best and language and maths, and the New Zealanders were best at mother language teaching. So we paid a visit to the New Zealand High Commissioner in Delhi, who happened to be Sir Edmund Hillary. I asked if he could help us find some of the top educators in New Zealand to help us improve our mother-tongue language teaching. "Sure," he said. "I can find somebody to help you."<br/><br/>So we recruited teachers from New Zealand, the Netherlands and elsewhere to help our team develop our curriculum, materials and teaching methods, with a view toward provide the highest-quality education we could to the poor.<br/><br/>*<br/><br/>To find good teachers, we didn't go to teachers' colleges, but looked within the community for a housewife with a high school education. These women received an initial induction training of two weeks, followed by classroom supervision twice a week and monthly refresher training. This developed them, over time, into excellent schoolteachers for the children of the village. And these teachers would be role models for local girls, who form the majority in our classrooms.<br/><br/>By ensuring quality, we soon found that students from BRAC schools were outperforming those from government schools. We are now operating 60,000 one-teacher schools in Bangladesh and other countries in Asia and Africa. We have been able to provide high-quality schooling to an entire generation – approximately 11 million graduates from the primary and pre-primary levels – who would have otherwise remained illiterate.<br/><br/>I would end by reflecting on remarks made by Norman Borlaug in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when the Green Revolution was still in its early days. Despite the spectacular gains in wheat production that had been seen in India, West Pakistan and the Philippines, Borlaug said the Green Revolution was not yet a victory but merely "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation." It had granted us a breathing space, he said, in which we had a chance to solve larger problems.<br/><br/>Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that today we are still within that breathing space created by the Green Revolution. We now have a historic opportunity to end extreme poverty and hunger within our lifetimes. The Sustainable Development Goals set a target of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030, and I believe it is within our power to do so. <br/><br/>We have called into question the fatalistic belief, prevalent throughout history, that widespread human misery is an immutable part of nature. We understand, finally, that things once considered an inevitable aspect of the human experience, often thought to be ordained by a higher power -- things like hunger, poverty, seasonal famine, the oppression of women, and the marginalisation of great portions of society -- are in fact changeable through the power of human activity. And we understand that even the poorest among us can be the agents of this change.<br/><br/>Let us therefore make good use of the breathing space of the Green Revolution to disrupt these cycles of suffering forever.<br/><br/>Thank you."</p>
<p>- Sir Fazle Hasan Abed KCMG</p>
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Saturday, 24…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-09-01:4777346:Comment:1029432021-09-01T12:18:07.022Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
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<div class="userItemView"><div class="userItemHeader"><span class="userItemDateCreated">Saturday, 24 October 2015 18:00</span><h3 class="userItemTitle"><a href="http://www.brac.net/speeches-presentations/item/722-borlaug-lecture-empowering-the-poor-in-the-fight-against-hunger">Borlaug Lecture: "Empowering the Poor in the Fight Against Hunger"</a></h3>
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<p>Sir Fazle Hasan Abed<br/>Borlaug Lecture, Iowa State University<br/>12 October 2015</p>
<p>"President Leath, faculty, student, ladies and gentleman,</p>
<p>Each year the World Food Prize Laureate delivers the Borlaug Lecture here at Iowa State University, principally on the subject agricultural science and its potential to advance human progress. Not being an agricultural scientist myself, I have worked most of my life not primarily on science but chiefly on the empowerment of human beings to defeat poverty and hunger. I trust the agricultural community will not be disappointed by this presentation.</p>
<p>Almost 45 years ago, in December 1970, Norman Borlaug delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm. The Green Revolution was still in its infancy, yet it had already delivered spectacular increases in cereal crop yields in India, West Pakistan and the Philippines; and, as Borlaug rightly pointed out, for the millions who had long lived with daily hunger and were now fed by its bountiful harvests, the transformation of the Green Revolution must have seemed like a miracle.</p>
<p>At the time, the Green Revolution had still barely touched my native Bangladesh, then called East Pakistan. I was 34 years old in late 1970, living a comfortable life as a senior executive at Shell Oil, and going through a transformation of my own. A terrible cyclone had struck the coast of Bangladesh, killing hundreds of thousands of mainly poor people. The cyclone made me question the value my comfortable corporate life in the face of such death and devastation.</p>
<p>Within a year, another cataclysm struck -- a war for independence in which 10 million people left the country, most of them on foot, fleeing the Pakistan Army's attacks on the civilian population. Our independence struggle, aided by India, was short lived. By the end of 1971, an independent Bangladesh was born.</p>
<p>Tonight, 44 years later, I am able to look back at a life dedicated to eradicating poverty, hunger, illiteracy and exploitation. I would like to share some of the things I have learned on this journey, particularly about the relationship between hunger, poverty and powerlessness.</p>
<p>We knew the process of rebuilding Bangladesh would be immense. It was one of the poorest countries on earth when we achieved our independence: Life expectancy at birth was a mere 46 years, and one in four children died before their fifth birthday. Our main crop was rice, but only 10 per cent of cultivated land was irrigated, and we produced less than 11 million metric tonnes per year, against a need of about 14 million to feed our people.</p>
<p>The land was overcrowded, and population growth was out of control. The average woman bore more than six children. To give you a sense of the population density of Bangladesh, consider that our land area is almost exactly the same as the state of Iowa's; yet our population in 1971 was 70 million, about 22 times that of Iowa, and today we are 50 times the population of Iowa.</p>
<p>In 1972, I started a relief effort in a remote area in the northeast of the country called Shalla to help returning refugees from the war. Their homes and means of livelihood had been completely destroyed, and the vast majority of them lacked the resources to rebuild their lives in any meaningful way.</p>
<p>My personal transformation was now complete. While I valued the skills I had acquired working in the private sector, after confronting the conditions of poverty found in Shalla, I knew there was no way I could return to a comfortable corporate life. I resolved to commit the rest of my life to helping the poor extricate themselves from poverty. The organization now known as BRAC was born.</p>
<p>Today, thanks in large part to the empowerment of women, Bangladesh has seen one of the most dramatic declines in fertility rates ever seen, from an average of 6.4 children per woman to just 2.1. Changes in other basic indicators of quality of life, including life expectancy, child mortality and maternal mortality, have been equally dramatic.</p>
<p>The road here wasn't easy. We worked hard to address the causes, not merely the symptoms, of Bangladesh's widespread and deeply entrenched poverty and hunger. I understood that simple relief work, such as replacing destroyed homes and distributing food and medicine, would do little to solve the underlying problems. So we turned to the long-term development of human potential -- not limiting ourselves to one area, such as health, education, agriculture, or livelihoods, but working in all these sectors, applying a holistic set of solutions and evaluating the results along the way.</p>
<p>We were eager to be as effective as possible and learn from our mistakes. We introduced cooperative agricultural schemes, literacy programs, health care and family planning, credit support for landless farmers, and much more besides. I could see that, just as poverty does not have one simple cause, it could not have one easy solution.</p>
<p>For a country in chaos, the work of Norman Borlaug, M.S. Swaminathan and others making advances in food science, together with the news of what had been accomplished by the farmers in India, were a message of hope.</p>
<p>It gave us confidence that, if we worked hard and brought these technologies and methods to our farmers in Shalla, they would see similar gains. When I wrote our first major funding proposal for Oxfam, I was naive enough to think that we could triple rice yields and completely eliminate adult illiteracy within our intervention area within five years.</p>
<p>In fact, we failed in many of our first efforts. As I look back on our initial optimism, I am struck by how much we have learned.</p>
<p>After working in Shalla for some time, I began to see a more deep-rooted problem of powerlessness among the poor -- a lack of agency, a lack of control over even the smallest aspects of their lives. Eventually, in our efforts to empower them, we entered into a series of dialogues with the villagers. We began an adult education program based on group discussions, employing the teaching methodologies of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire.</p>
<p>Like Norman Borlaug, Freire was a visionary who inspired me greatly. For him, lifting people out of poverty, hunger and oppression was part of the process of "humanisation," as he wrote in his seminal work "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." According to Freire, humanisation is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and violence; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice. This book was first published in English in 1970 so, like the Green Revolution, his ideas were fresh at the time. I believe they are as important today as they were then.</p>
<p>When we began, I was convinced -- as I remain convinced today -- that, to achieve real empowerment, people need to be aware of their situation and develop a sense of self-worth in order to change it.</p>
<p>During our literacy classes, the teachers acted as facilitators of discussions which explored the true meanings of words as perceived through the life experiences of the learners themselves. This was a learning process for us as well as the students. We developed 100 lessons, each based on a key word, and discussions focused on these words.</p>
<p>One of the first words in our curriculum was "hunger," or upash in the Bengali language. People in the villages were very familiar with this word and concept, and the discussions became quite animated. Anyone who has ever felt pangs of hunger would have a visceral sense of what hunger is, but those who had suffered from chronic hunger had a deeper perspective. They said that being hungry was like being in prison, locked away in a cage, isolated from others, and unable to communicate with anyone else, except for others who were also hungry and in a similar state of powerlessness.</p>
<p>Breaking free from that cage, we learned, was not as easy as we had initially hoped. Farmers' habits were deeply ingrained and would not change overnight. The vast majority of the crops were rain-fed, and bringing irrigation to the fields through tube-wells would prove to be a tremendous hurdle. It would take a long time, many years, for new methods of agriculture to catch on. In fact, we are still bringing the Green Revolution to parts of Bangladesh and now Africa.</p>
<p>One of the problems we encountered was that local power structures in rural areas were exploitative, cruel and corrupt, with moneylenders, landlords and local elites often taking advantage of the landless poor in collusion with the local police and government officials. As a result, although they worked hard to survive, the work of the poorest gained little traction in terms of improving their living conditions.</p>
<p>I began to see the difficulty of breaking down the fatalism that held sway in rural areas. If hunger is a cage, and poverty is powerlessness, it was in part because landless people were locked out of these local power structures. They were constantly in debt to moneylenders, earning the lowest of pay for manual labour. Women in particular, often married off at the age of 13 to one of those landless labourers, bore the brunt of oppression.</p>
<p>Although many of our initial efforts fell short, we found our dialogue sessions were successful in building people's self-worth and solidarity. We wanted to empower the poor, to equip them with the tools they needed to break free from these constraints. One of these tools was the confidence and self-esteem to know that their actions really mattered. If we could create the conditions for people to improve their lives through their own agency and action, and they could see meaningful progress, I knew they would do the hard work of ending poverty themselves.</p>
<p>We began thinking about what we could do to create those conditions. We introduced group-based microcredit without collateral, allowing people to borrow and invest in new seeds, fertilizer, and farming technologies without the high rates charged by moneylenders. We introduced homestead vegetable gardens, financed by micro-loans, to add nutrients to people's diets. Later, we began introducing entirely new crops, such as maize, which was linked to a poultry industry centered on female farmers. We built value chains for other industries, such as dairy, to benefit women who owned milk cows.</p>
<p>Today, I am pleased to say that Bangladesh has achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Though our population has gone up 2.2 times since independence, our food production has gone up 3.1 times. This has happened through widespread irrigation during the dry seasons, the introduction of improved varieties, more effective usage of fertilizer, and other changes to farming practices. This process continues and we have seen many of these interventions, adapted to local contexts, having profound impacts on hunger and food security in other parts of Asia and in Africa.</p>
<p>But the underlying causes of hunger cannot be addressed through food security alone. Without clean water, basic healthcare, family planning services, and quality education for children, families remain trapped in the cycle of poverty.</p>
<p>I saw that we would never bring down the fertility rate without bringing down the high mortality of children in our society. The problem was not merely that family planning services were unavailable, although that was part of it. The Government, to its credit, actually began offering free family planning services, but few were accessing them. In our own intervention areas, we succeeded in raising contraceptive usage rates from single digits to about 20 per cent in the late 1970s. But we seemed to hit a ceiling there.</p>
<p>After listening to rural women’s concerns, I learned why. Many were actively choosing to have more children because they had so little confidence these children would actually live to adulthood. As I mentioned, at the time of independence, one in four Bangladeshi children didn't even make it to their 5th birthday, one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world. The toll in grief and human suffering was incalculable and, moreover, it was keeping generation after generation locked in a cycle of misery.</p>
<p>At the start of the 1980s, we launched a ten-year effort to teach mothers -- 13 million in all -- how to administer oral rehydration fluid to children with deadly diarrhea, one of the biggest killers of children. Many people, including trusted friends and colleagues, were skeptical that a relatively little known NGO, which had not even begun to work at a national level until then, would be able to reach so many people and catalyse such widespread behavioral change. But this program helped to reduce the rate of child deaths from diarrhea by 80 per cent. Together with the government, we also established a national immunisation program that took the country from 4 per cent immunisation coverage in 1986 to 72 per cent in 1990.</p>
<p>As a result, people gained confidence that their children would survive and accepted the benefits of having smaller families. Meanwhile, we began training village women to serve as community health workers, providing health products and services (including contraception) to their neighbors. We now have more than 100,000 community health promoters providing these services.</p>
<p>I believe this empowering combination of children's, maternal and reproductive health services, delivered on a local level at a massive scale, helped catalyse one of the steepest declines in fertility rates the world has ever seen.</p>
<p>With the child mortality rate falling dramatically, so many more children would now survive into adulthood. People rightly began to ask: Why are we teaching literacy to adults only? If we are interested in long-term development, wouldn't it be better to start with children? The Government's own schools were out of the reach of many poor families due mainly to cost and distance and, in any case, provided a poor-quality education to the few that could afford it.</p>
<p>Starting in the mid-1980s, we began training housewives, many of whom had only high school level education themselves, to work as schoolteachers in their own villages. In one-room schools, with majority girls in the classroom, we targeted exclusively the children from the poorest families. Many have compared these schools to the prairie schools of the American frontier, and indeed we were, in a sense, on a frontier of our own, working in villages not yet reached by the government school system.</p>
<p>For these village schools and teachers, we applied the same principle of empowerment and scale used in our health and family planning programs, that is, empowering people on a local level to take care of their own needs. An entire generation -- more than 11 million children -- have now come through BRAC schools. Remarkably, perhaps because of the value we place on encouraging critical thinking as opposed to rote learning, multiple studies have shown that these children perform better in standardized tests than children from more privileged backgrounds.</p>
<p>To be sure, none of these things caught on like wildfire. As I mentioned, it took many years, decades in some cases, to see the true impact of our work. But, for individuals, the knowledge of being in charge of their own destiny was like a light being turned on -- the light of hope.</p>
<p>In his Nobel speech, Norman Borlaug spoke of the historical precariousness of man's existence. Throughout most of history, humans have lived an uncertain existence, never secure in the knowledge that we would have enough to eat. He also suggested that perhaps the term "Green Revolution" was still "too premature, too optimistic, or too broad in scope." The temporary success of the Green Revolution had only given humankind a "breathing space" to solve more deep-rooted problems like overpopulation, he said.</p>
<p>I believe we are still within that breathing space created by the Green Revolution, and its true potential has yet to emerge. We have a great set of challenges before us. The problem of hunger still looms, for instance. It has been said that, to feed the world, we will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have in the last 10,000. This may sound daunting, but I am confident that, even with the challenge of ongoing climate change added to the equation, we can do it provided a new generation of Norman Borlaugs emerges.</p>
<p>Defeating hunger does not depend only on the science of food production. It requires us to address the problem of powerlessness among the poor -- of putting an end to that feeling, articulated so many decades ago by the villagers in Bangladesh, and still felt by so many millions today, of being locked in a cage.</p>
<p>As Amartya Sen has written, poverty cannot be reduced to a single factor, such as insufficient income or the lack of healthy meals. It is, at heart, a deprivation on one's capacity to be fully human -- to be able to lead a life that one has good reason to find meaningful or valuable.</p>
<p>I believe that the true promise of the Green Revolution means breaking free from hunger and fatalism, and that it is part of the ongoing process of becoming fully human -- making people shapers of their own destiny, able to build their futures instead of holding out their hands in supplication, and to lead lives filled with meaning and purpose, transforming the world around them.</p>
<p>Thank you."</p>
<p>- Sir Fazle Hasan Abed KCMG</p>
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<div class="userItemLinks"><div class="userItemCategory"><span>Published in</span><span> </span><a href="http://www.brac.net/speeches-presentations">Speeches and Presentations</a></div>
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</div> stories from brac1 includes p…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-09-01:4777346:Comment:1029422021-09-01T12:07:06.963Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<p>stories from brac<a href="https://crewsnet.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Delivering%20Results%20in%20the%20Fight%20Against%20Poverty%20-%20BRAC.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1 includes paulo freire lesson format an ultra poor grad's story</a></p>
<p>stories from brac<a href="https://crewsnet.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Delivering%20Results%20in%20the%20Fight%20Against%20Poverty%20-%20BRAC.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1 includes paulo freire lesson format an ultra poor grad's story</a></p> from harvard summit 2008
BRAC…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-06-01:4777346:Comment:1021262021-06-01T12:55:54.023Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<p><a href="https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/102101.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">from harvard summit 2008</a></p>
<p>BRAC: Building Resources Across Communities<br></br>The Coproduction of Governance: Civil Society, the<br></br>Government, and the Private Sector<br></br>Fazle Hasan Abed<br></br>fatema.ak@brac.net<br></br>Mr. Abed will reflect on his own experiences and his own learning over the past 36 years<br></br>with regard to setting up and running BRAC. His main thesis will be that…</p>
<p><a href="https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/102101.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">from harvard summit 2008</a></p>
<p>BRAC: Building Resources Across Communities<br/>The Coproduction of Governance: Civil Society, the<br/>Government, and the Private Sector<br/>Fazle Hasan Abed<br/>fatema.ak@brac.net<br/>Mr. Abed will reflect on his own experiences and his own learning over the past 36 years<br/>with regard to setting up and running BRAC. His main thesis will be that in a country like<br/>Bangladesh, it is possible make a significant positive change in the lives of the poor and other<br/>marginalized people, including women. In fact, “it is possible to bring hope back!” He will<br/>recollect how he decided to move to the uncharted territory of “development” and to leave his<br/>secure career in a multinational oil company.<br/>BRAC started as a small relief and rehabilitation effort in a remote rural district of<br/>Bangladesh after the liberation of the country. Early on, it became clear that relief was not the<br/>way to make a sustainable improvement in poor people’s lives, and BRAC started<br/>experimenting with “development.” Different projects on health, education, and economic<br/>development were piloted. Some were successful while others were not.<br/>Mr. Abed will explore a major question that BRAC faced with regard to successful<br/>programs and agencies: how should they be dealt with? The traditional wisdom was that the<br/>government would replicate them, but given the situation prevailing at that time, it was not<br/>going to happen.<br/>Mr. Abed will discuss the example of an early successful program. The year 1979<br/>was named the “International Year of the Child,” and BRAC knew from its work that high<br/>infant mortality and fertility were major problems facing the country. BRAC also knew that<br/>people would not lower the number of children born to their families until they were sure that<br/>their children would survive to complete a desired family size. Diarrhea was one of the most<br/>prevalent causes of childhood death. BRAC decided to make the importance of oral<br/>rehydration known to the mothers. With a successful pilot, BRAC started teaching mothers<br/>about this in every household throughout the country. This was the first time that BRAC took<br/>one of its programs nationwide. This gave BRAC the experience of how to organize and plan<br/>for upscaling programs. After this, BRAC undertook nationwide programs in many areas,<br/>including health, education, and microfinance.<br/>Mr. Abed will demonstrate that BRAC’s strategy is to first test the effectiveness of an<br/>idea through pilots, then to examine their efficiency before scaling up. BRAC is now the<br/>Page 14 – Mr. Fazle Abed Keynote<br/>largest NGO in the South, but it has not remained restricted to working within Bangladesh<br/>alone. Its programs are now found in diverse settings such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri<br/>Lanka, Uganda, Tanzania, and Southern Sudan.<br/>One of BRAC’s distinguishing features is its belief, and consequent investment in<br/>capacity development. To this end, BRAC has set up a university. It has graduate schools in<br/>public health, development studies, and governance studies. BRAC University works with<br/>many universities in the North, including Harvard, to improve its curriculum in terms of both<br/>the science and art. BRAC also works very closely with national governments to improve<br/>governance of the public sector. In fact, BRAC works with the government in implementing<br/>many of its programs. These include a focused effort on immunization, and the two serious<br/>problems of tuberculosis and malaria. BRAC believes in synergy, and thus works in<br/>partnership with other stakeholders, including the government, the private sector, and donors.<br/>BRAC trains government bureaucrats and doctors through short certificate courses and longterm master's programs. Dr. Gowher Rizvi helped BRAC design a master's degree program<br/>for the government civil servants. Finally, Mr. Abed will conclude by highlighting another of<br/>BRAC’s key distinguishing features—the fact that it finances its development programs. Of<br/>the (USD)$430 million annual budget in 2007, BRAC generated 70% of it from its own<br/>enterprises within the country.<br/>Fazle Hasan Abed was born in Bangladesh in 1936. Abed was educated in Dhaka and<br/>Glasgow Universities and qualified as a Chartered Accountant in London. The 1971<br/>Liberation War of Bangladesh had a profound effect on Abed, then in his thirties and holding<br/>a senior Corporate Executive position at Shell Oil. The war dramatically changed the<br/>direction of his life: he left his job and went to London to devote himself to Bangladesh’s<br/>War of Independence. There, Abed helped initiate the “Help Bangladesh” campaign,<br/>organizing funds to raise awareness about Bangladesh. After the war, Abed returned to the<br/>newly independent Bangladesh to find the economy of his country in ruins. Millions of<br/>refugees, who had sought shelter in India during the war, started trekking back into the<br/>country. The tremendous need for humanitarian relief called for urgent efforts. Abed decided<br/>to take action by setting up BRAC (formerly, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement<br/>Committee), dedicated to the rehabilitation of returning refugees in a remote area in<br/>northeastern Bangladesh. This work led him and BRAC to deal with the long-term task of<br/>improving living conditions of the rural poor. He focused his organization’s efforts on<br/>helping the poor develop their capacity to manage and control their own destiny. Thus,<br/>BRAC's primary objectives emerged as alleviation of poverty and empowerment of the poor.<br/>In the span of only three decades, BRAC grew to become the largest non-governmental<br/>development organization in the world, in terms of its scale and the diversity of its<br/>interventions. Abed has been recognized with a number of awards, including the Ramon<br/>Page 15 – Mr. Fazle Abed Keynote<br/>Magsaysay Prize, the UNICEF Maurice Pate Award, the Olof Palme Prize, Schwab<br/>Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurship Award, UNDP’s Mahbub-ul-Haq Award, the Henry R.<br/>Kravis Prize in Leadership, and the first Clinton Global Citizenship Award. He is also a<br/>founding member of Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship, and has<br/>received several honorary degrees, including Doctor of Humane Letters from Yale<br/>University.</p> from world bank brief 1998
Su…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-06-01:4777346:Comment:1023182021-06-01T12:50:21.400Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<p><a href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/949281468156577073/pdf/688120BR0Box030puties00July01601998.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">from world bank brief 1998</a></p>
<p>Summary of Discussion with NGO Representatives from IDA Countries<br></br>IDA Deputies Meeting, London, May 14, 1998<br></br>During the IDA 12 Replenishment meeting in London on May 14, 1998, the Deputies<br></br>met with a group ofNGO representatives from developing countries. The NGO representatives<br></br>were:<br></br>Fazle…</p>
<p><a href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/949281468156577073/pdf/688120BR0Box030puties00July01601998.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">from world bank brief 1998</a></p>
<p>Summary of Discussion with NGO Representatives from IDA Countries<br/>IDA Deputies Meeting, London, May 14, 1998<br/>During the IDA 12 Replenishment meeting in London on May 14, 1998, the Deputies<br/>met with a group ofNGO representatives from developing countries. The NGO representatives<br/>were:<br/>Fazle Abed, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)<br/>Charles Abugre, Integrated Social Development Center (ISODEC), Ghana<br/>Mihir Bhatt, Foundation for Public Interest, India<br/>Jocelyn Dow, Red Thread Women's Development Project, Guyana<br/>Sheila Kawamara, Ugandan Women's Network, Uganda<br/>lalal Abdel Latif, Inter-Africa Group, Ethiopia<br/>Ravi Pradhan, Alliance for Energy, Nepal<br/>Edwin Zablah, Federation ofNGOslF ACS, Nicaragua<br/>Following is a summary of their presentations and the discussion with the Deputies.<br/>Jocelyn Dow took the chair on behalf of the N GOs and said that she appreciated that, by<br/>their presence at the Deputies meeting, the promise made by Mr. Wolfensohn to interact with<br/>civil society was being honored. She opened her presentation by referring to recent events in<br/>India, Mexico and Indonesia as being illustrative of the issues of conflict, environment and "how<br/>fragile social integration could be in the face of large economic pressures." This, she said, was<br/>why the NGOs saw a "very important and urgent need for the IDA replenishment to be real, great<br/>and as proactive as possible." She said that the NGOs sought to improve the growing partnership<br/>with the Bank and noted that the latter had taken on board a number ofNGO criticisms over the<br/>years and put in place some important mechanisms for collaboration which needed to be<br/>deepened.<br/>She noted that the issues that were raised by the NGOs at their meeting with the Deputies<br/>in 1995-participation, poverty reduction and good governance--were still very important, and<br/>added that, to the NGOs, good governance means a deepening of democratic processes in their<br/>countries. Commenting that the Bank was cautious in its approach to that process, she stressed<br/>the need for greater transparency and accountability by borrowing governments.<br/>Fazle Abed sketched out recent economic and social progress in Bangladesh to which he<br/>said IDA and a number of donors had contributed. Bangladesh now has the capacity to absorb a<br/>larger IDA allocation, he said, noting that a large number ofNGOs were now collaborating with<br/>programs funded by IDA and other bilateral and multilateral donors, with IDA playing the role of<br/>coordinator. But he went on to say that there was a large unfinished agenda in Bangladesh in the<br/>area of governance and corruption, and here, although the Bank does not see the issues from the<br/>same perspective as the NGOs, it is now trying to address them more effectively than before. He<br/>said that in a country like Bangladesh where democracy is not very strong, donors have a role to<br/>Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized<br/>- 2 -<br/>play in pushing governments in ways that NGOs are not empowered to do.<br/>The Bank, he argued, has too many economists and too few political scientists,<br/>anthropologists and sociologists, but despite these and other criticisms, there was always<br/>dialogue and debate with the Bank. He added that the Bank was now more open and that, under<br/>Mr. Wolfensohn, had become more sensitive to the needs and aspirations of civil society. "So<br/>I'm very hopeful that the Bank is going in the right direction, and I think you need to support it,"<br/>he told the Deputies.<br/>Sheila Kawamara expressed her appreciation for the Bank's efforts to involve civil<br/>society in participation but questioned whether NGOs received enough information or had the<br/>technical skills to engage with the Bank. She asked the Bank to define participation more clearly<br/>and to help the poor with project formulation, planning, implementation and management so that<br/>they can sustain IDA-financed projects. "Or are they white elephants in our countries?" she said.<br/>She complained that, while work on gender is'mentioned in economic and sector work, it is not<br/>actually being put into practice. "For example," she said, "we don't feel that when consultations<br/>are going on, there is enough attention being given to gender-specific constraints that may inhibit<br/>women from participating in discussions or consultations." She also asked the Bank to provide<br/>more gender-disaggregated data.<br/>Mihir Bhatt asked the deputies to maintain and, if possible, expand support for IDA.<br/>Arguing the case for maintaining India's level of funding, he said that there are more poor in<br/>India than anywhere else, there are more poverty reduction programs by state and national<br/>governments, a long working relationship between the Bank and the Indian government, and a<br/>varied and vibrant NGO community. He also suggested that India was a good place for IDA to<br/>experiment with innovative and creative projects. He urged the deputies to look through and<br/>beyond current events in India and see a country with a lot of poor people. Referring to states in<br/>South Asia choosing to spend money on arms rather than on the poor, he said, "it is because the<br/>climate is such, and that cannot be only resolved by India, but by the entire international<br/>community together."<br/>Referring to the Strategic Compact's commitment to strengthen efforts to reach the poor,<br/>he said there is already some evidence of change at an operational level. He referred to the<br/>Social Development Unit in the New Delhi Office and said that he was encouraged that, rather<br/>than relying on one person to manage a project, there were now task teams which were able to<br/>bring in people to work on gender and social development. Within the social sector, he argued<br/>that funds should go into maternal and child protection and work security. He also said he would<br/>like to see IDA fund "community infrastructure development" where the community would have<br/>direct access to investments for its own infrastructure development. He went on to suggest that<br/>private municipal investments should be audited from a social sector point of view. He said that<br/>in its support for the private sector, the Bank focused too much on the corporate sector and<br/>should look at the cooperative sector as well.<br/>He said that participation had increased in a lot of Bank projects but that under IDA12<br/>this could go beyond NGOs to direct participation of the poor themselves. "The poor are the <br/>- 3 -<br/>stakeholders, the users, the managers and the owners of the projects themselves," he said.<br/>He concluded by referring to the Bank as a knowledge-creating organization that not only<br/>gives money but creates an intellectual framework. If IDA did not have enough resources, a lot<br/>of poverty-related intellectual work would not be done. "And, believe it or not, but a lot of the<br/>poverty-related agenda is set by the World Bank's documents, through country assistance<br/>strategies, through economic and sector work, and through poverty assessments," he said.<br/>Jalal Abdel Latif started by noting that he wished that the NGOs had had access to some<br/>ofthe IDA documents which their northern colleagues had given them earlier on as this would<br/>have contributed to their input to the meeting. He pointed out that there is less access to<br/>information when you are from a recipient country.<br/>Noting that 10 to 14 countries in Africa are emerging from war, he said that there was a<br/>close correlation between poverty and conflict. He said that groups that are not in power could<br/>be marginalized and asked who benefits from IDA funds when a country is emerging from war.<br/>He also questioned the sequencing and pace of reform when there are two tracks to be followed:<br/>the transition to an open market and democratization. "How could a former rebel suddenly<br/>become democratic, build a democracy, and suddenly sign a structural adjustment program?" he<br/>asked. "It's a dilemma for the rebel group, for civil society and for the Bank and bilaterals." The<br/>consultative process should include rebel groups who are currently waging war, he said.<br/>"Tomorrow Sudan may come up, Somalia may have a government." In the case of Congo, he<br/>suggested that holding back assistance might lead to new conflict. He didn't think IDA should<br/>create a new post-conflict funding window. More well-informed analysis needs to be done first.<br/>He said he didn't think that the Bank was in the best position to deal with questions of<br/>political governance. "Lending policies have been very closed, not open, not public. I don't<br/>think that kind of organization has clear higher ground on credibility to deal with governance<br/>issues ... what are the best other multinational organizations that will be in a better position to<br/>raise that issue?" he asked.<br/>Turning to how IDA can best help the private sector, he noted that in Ethiopia, 90 percent<br/>of small farmers are private and need to be supported through market information, extension etc.<br/>He wondered whether IDA private sector guarantees would support power, telecommunication,<br/>satellites and so on. "I think if existing instruments like MIGA, IFC and those from the AIDB<br/>have not enabled Africa to attract private sector investment, what value added will be brought by<br/>this new instrument? So, better not use IDA money for that. We are for IDA to go more into the<br/>social sectors."<br/>He said there was a big need for IDA funds in Africa and noted that ESAF and SPA were<br/>competing for the same amount of taxpayer's money. "But why I am in favor of the IDA<br/>replenishment, why I campaign for IDA, I think the engagement with you, the discussion with<br/>the World Bank, the change in the Bank has allowed a space for us to speak."<br/>Ms. Dow proposed that the group should take some questions from the deputies at this <br/>- 4 -<br/>point and have the other three NGO representatives take up issues as they arose. The first<br/>question was whether any of the group had been involved in consultations with civil society on<br/>country assistance strategies, and if so, how has it worked?<br/>Charles Abugre said that during the second Ghana CAS preparation, the mission had<br/>been in town for several weeks doing sector negotiations when the NGOs were asked to sit in as<br/>observers on the final day of round table discussions with the government. They made some<br/>comments and said that if the process was not final, they would like to regroup with civil society<br/>and make an input to the discussion. "We were told yes, but there were only two or three weeks<br/>to make that input. So the NGOs did get together and make an input, and that was the end of the<br/>matter." He said the process varied from country to country. In some cases NGOs don't even<br/>have the benefit of a day or two. In some cases one or two organizations are selected; in others,<br/>it's a larger group.<br/>He made two other points on the CAS process. In the Ghana CAS, there was a review of<br/>progress on poverty reduction, but this was not an operational trigger point. "That happens in a<br/>lot of CASs, meaning you talk about, but cannot actually operationalize, it as a point of<br/>negotiation of influence." Secondly, he said, civil organizations in Ghana are becoming worried<br/>that the CAS which is an important mechanism for consultation but is, in the end, a Bank<br/>financing instrument, is starting to take over the planning process for the state. "It pre-empts the<br/>ability of a very young democratic process to do planning, to debate among themselves and<br/>generate a policy framework which it can own."<br/>Edwin Zablah said that in Nicaragua, civil society felt like a ping-pong ball when the<br/>CAS was being formulated, and they wanted to give their point of view. In the end, after quite a<br/>bit of shuttling between the Bank and the Government, there was a very wide consultation with<br/>private sector, NGOs, unions and women's organizations. "Now we are waiting for the CAS<br/>document to be distributed among the people who were consulted."<br/>Mihir Bhatt said the Bank had invited NGOs to Delhi to consult them on their<br/>operational experience for the water and sanitation sector study. They were also consulted twice<br/>for the CAS, once on the main 12-page document, and again for the gender aspects of the CAS.<br/>He said he would like future CASs to include labor market analysis, especially for the informal<br/>sector.<br/>A Deputy asked how representative the NGOs were of people in their countries when<br/>they commented on CASso<br/>Jocelyn Dow said that she thought there should be a matrix for consultation that the Bank<br/>should use and it should not be up to whether the government agrees or not. At the minimum<br/>there should be the posting of a public notice saying, "the World Bank is here, we are about to<br/>develop a country program, we urge members of civil society to make contact with the Ministry<br/>of Finance." In some countries, she argued, programs are dealt with in the Ministry of Finance<br/>alone, and the cabinet may not be involved, much less NGOs. <br/>- 5 -<br/>Fazle Abed said that NGOs are not elected, but that his 18,000 staff at BRAC see 2.3<br/>million members every week, and he didn't believe that any member of parliament had that kind<br/>of knowledge of the dynamics of poverty. Consulting people who are in touch with the grass<br/>roots will make CASs more responsive to the needs of poor people.<br/>Another Deputy asked Jalal Abdel Latif which organizations he had in mind when he<br/>said the World Bank was not in the best position to suggest solutions to matters of governance.<br/>Jalal Abdel Latif responded that new coordinated work needed to be done on political<br/>reform and that enough has been done on economic reform. He said he thought that governance<br/>should be looked into across the UN system, the Bank and the bilaterals. Some of the latter have<br/>much more depth and knowledge in this area than the multilaterals.<br/>Jocelyn Dow said she had a different perspective. She saw the CAS as a governance<br/>issue: "is it not good governance for you to ensure that all sectors of society are informed and<br/>knowledgeable about financial arrangements that are binding?" She suggested that the broader<br/>NGO movement might prepare a paper on the mechanisms for deepening discussions between<br/>the Bank and civil society.<br/>Several Deputies asked questions:<br/>• Have any of the panel been directly involved in executing Bank projects and is there any<br/>evidence that changes the Bank is making are improving the effectiveness of Bank<br/>programs?<br/>• Has anyone on the panel been involved in an Inspection Panel request? What is the<br/>availability ofInspection Panel reports (and management's action plans in response) to<br/>the people who bring the complaint?<br/>• NGO participation in the CAS sounds relatively passive. Should NGOs create the first<br/>document and have the World Bank comment on it?<br/>Fazle Abed, responding to the question on what has worked and not worked in NGOs'<br/>involvement in project implementation, said that the experience had been good when IDA<br/>funding had gone through a foundation for micro credits. Where the government is in full<br/>control, NGOs might be asked to bid, which is difficult for them to do because they are not going<br/>to make money in the process. In this situation, spurious NGOs might come up with the lowest<br/>cost bid, and the project would not meet its objectives.<br/>Charles Abugre said that ownership of the CAS started by getting basic democratic<br/>mechanisms in place to formulate medium-term plans. On the basis of those plans, the Bank<br/>could present its agenda, and the two agendas could then be debated. Civil society could have<br/>input to the domestic process and the subsequent discussion with the Bank. This respects the<br/>need for domestic consensus building. <br/>- 6 -<br/>While he had not been directly involved in the Inspection Panel, colleagues who had been<br/>felt it was in danger of being undennined by the inability of complaining communities to have<br/>direct interaction with the process once the complaint had been filed. The inability to access<br/>infonnation and the sense that the Panel is engaging in (or losing) internal battles was slowly<br/>eating away its energy and value. "It is important to reinforce this as an additional accountability<br/>mechanism."<br/>Ravi Pradhan, noting that one of his coalition partners had filed the first Inspection<br/>Panel claim, said there is no due process, no access to infonnation, to the Panel members, or to<br/>the analysis. Trying to restrict the eligibility to residents of a particular area would effectively<br/>rule out many of the claims. "And when we hear news that the Bank's Directors are thinking of<br/>abolishing the Inspection Panel or reducing its scope of operation, limited as it is, we are, of<br/>course, worried because we have no access to any source of alternative hearing." He said he<br/>would like to see its scope expanded.<br/>Edwin Zablah complained that Nicaragua had used 48 percent of its IDA funds in the<br/>economic recovery program so less was being used on poverty alleviation. The government<br/>closed the National Development Bank and didn't open any alternative to provide credit for<br/>small and medium producers. There had not been any participation from civil society in this<br/>structural adjustment program. "Who is going to pay the social cost of the adjustment plan. We<br/>know it's necessary, but the social cost is too high ... in a country that has been in a very intensive<br/>conflict for almost 12 years?"<br/>A Deputy said he was surprised that structural adjustment had not been raised before and<br/>asked if the Bank had changed the way it handled these programs. He also wondered if any of<br/>the panel was involved in SAPRI.<br/>Charles Abugre said he represented the Third World Network secretariat in Africa,<br/>which is the original center for the SAPRIs in Africa (Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mali and Ghana).<br/>The process was delayed for five months as issues relating to disclosure policy were resolved.<br/>Initial estimates of how much local mobilization would cost were too low. In addition, some<br/>technical methodological issues need to be addressed, and efforts are underway to involve<br/>bilaterals both for funding and for infonnal monitoring.<br/>He said that the "political" approach to adjustment had changed with more attempts to<br/>listen and even to allow for opposition participation and to pennit some debate. Nevertheless, in<br/>substance, very little had changed. ESAF mandated deficit reduction measures, which are<br/>outside the Bank's responsibility and are unchanged. For privatization, the emphasis is on speed<br/>rather than the quality.<br/>Jocelyn Dow said that in Guyana the structural adjustment program had exacerbated<br/>racial tensions because there was pressure on public sector wages affecting Afro-Guyanese, and<br/>positive responses towards private sector development which affects Indo-Guyanese. She<br/>suggested that ethnicity should be considered when allocating resources. She added that she<br/>thought skills were lost through adjustment programs and that as Jamaica must be one of the<br/>countries that has experienced adjustment for the longest period, there should be a country <br/>•<br/>.. - 7 -<br/>review to see what skills are left compared to when the programs started. She suggested that<br/>Nicaragua might also be reviewed. She suggested that accountability and participation could be<br/>enhanced through the development of National Advisory Boards which would involve trade<br/>unions, the public sector, members of the parliamentary opposition, and women's groups. She<br/>said, "this would force, for certain, a government response at the national level which is<br/>respectful of sovereignty but engages the government in another layer of accountability."<br/>A Deputy asked what transparency they would like to see the Bank apply to NGOs to<br/>ensure that they are representative of poor people in order to work with them, and would they<br/>agree to have their accounts checked by people from the Bank?<br/>Mihir Bhatt said that as his organization is a public charitable trust, anyone can pay five<br/>rupees to the charity commissioner and will be given a complete copy of their accounts. But he<br/>added that it was more important for them to be accountable to the people with whom they work.<br/>Fazle Abed said his organization was accountable to the people they serve, to the<br/>government to whom they must provide audited accounts, and to the donors who give them<br/>money. He added that parliamentarians from donor countries come to see what they are doing in<br/>the field.<br/>A Deputy asked whether the NGO representatives were independent of their<br/>governments.<br/>Jocelyn Dow replied, "I don't believe that any of us sitting at the table is, as we would<br/>say, in bed with the government." She agreed that some NGOs, through force of circumstance,<br/>have a relationship with government in which they walk a very thin line, but the opening up of<br/>space in most societies has made this less of a problem.<br/>Charles Abugre asked the deputies how they saw the tradeoffs between IDA, SPA and<br/>ESAF when allocating donor budgets.<br/>A Deputy responded that they are all important and that in his country all three were<br/>funded from the same ministry and that his country can fulfill all its financing obligations.<br/>In closing remarks Jocelyn Dow she said that the NGOs were becoming more and more<br/>fraternal with the Bank staff and management. They are still full of criticisms, but compared<br/>with the WTO which some ofthem were about to visit, the Bank looks like an extremely friendly<br/>institution. (In response to an earlier comment from a Deputy that he had expected the NGOs to<br/>be on. the attack and had found them "very tame," she said "we are not going to hammer on the<br/>most proactive window (IDA)." She said the NGOs had come to the meeting in a spirit of<br/>partnership, not because they don't have serious criticisms of the Bank, but in recognition that<br/>there are not a lot of ideological or other options. "We must, collectively, make the Bank as<br/>people-centered as possible."<br/>In thanking the NGO representatives, Sven Sandstrom highlighted the theme of not<br/>thinking in terms of donors and recipients. "We are," he said, "all working to reduce poverty, <br/>- 8 -<br/>and I think the discussion here showed it." He said that what came out of this session was<br/>similar to what the Deputies had discussed earlier in the day, and in particular, the need for the<br/>CASs and the Bank's assistance strategy to be grounded in each country. He said there was a<br/>need to work on making sure that the Bank's work-the country officer's perspective-is<br/>grounded in each country, while at the same time making sure that the institutional perspectives<br/>are looked at and discussed. He added that the idea of a National Advisory Board or similar<br/>instrument was very interesting.</p> how billion asians ended pov…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-03-04:4777346:Comment:1016732021-03-04T17:03:48.158Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<p><br></br> how billion asians ended poverty empowered by women villagers</p>
<p>ways of microfranchising - as overall collaboration of women lift up half the sky</p>
<p>-the hunt for rural keynesianism - the economist from 1977 on in schumacher case earlier</p>
<p></p>
<p>nb in tech world this has vital connecxtion with what deep data are ai crunching before they become autonomus platforms or dominate what media messging you see</p>
<p></p>
<p>ways to micrifranchise</p>
<p>Train village moher to…</p>
<p><br/> how billion asians ended poverty empowered by women villagers</p>
<p>ways of microfranchising - as overall collaboration of women lift up half the sky</p>
<p>-the hunt for rural keynesianism - the economist from 1977 on in schumacher case earlier</p>
<p></p>
<p>nb in tech world this has vital connecxtion with what deep data are ai crunching before they become autonomus platforms or dominate what media messging you see</p>
<p></p>
<p>ways to micrifranchise</p>
<p>Train village moher to operate positive cashflow model</p>
<p>Licence to global nog or corporate to import microfranchise</p>
<p>Licence to local autotity -eg to operate a school</p>
<p>Educxation/trust overlap- community centres atract 24 hour franchises – from school to apprenticeship- to health/food centre, to bottom up professional services and swapping aps</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Very poorest villages need 90% common optiliation of grassroots slution networking – across borders of billion poorest family connected by women hold up hal the sky</p>
<blockquote cite="http://bracnet.ning.com/forum/topics/yy?commentId=4777346%3AComment%3A98353#4777346Comment98353"></blockquote> there are 2 completely differ…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-03-02:4777346:Comment:1010682021-03-02T15:02:20.243Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<p>there are 2 completely different levels to study food goal 2 action solutions with fazle</p>
<p></p>
<p>the enterprises- these are national leaders eg in seed replication, in leading value chain of poultry to crate over 1 million jobs and so</p>
<p></p>
<p>the miccrofranchises - about 50 job skills corresponding to village businesses that are replicable with positive income generation in any village that doesnt yet meet the demand for the relevant food's last mile supply - its these…</p>
<p>there are 2 completely different levels to study food goal 2 action solutions with fazle</p>
<p></p>
<p>the enterprises- these are national leaders eg in seed replication, in leading value chain of poultry to crate over 1 million jobs and so</p>
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<p>the miccrofranchises - about 50 job skills corresponding to village businesses that are replicable with positive income generation in any village that doesnt yet meet the demand for the relevant food's last mile supply - its these franchises that from 1977 sir fazle teams helped replicate across hundreds of thousands of villages so women could build a food secure rural nation</p> beijing paper 2007 Chapter 27…tag:bracnet.ning.com,2021-03-02:4777346:Comment:1012392021-03-02T13:52:06.308Zchris macraehttps://bracnet.ning.com/profile/chrismacrae
<p>beijing paper 2007 Chapter 27<br></br>Microfinance Interventions to Enable the Poorest to Improve Their Asset Base<br></br>Fazle Hasan Abed</p>
<p><br></br>Microfinance has proven an effective tool in alleviating poverty, particularly<br></br>among the population living on less than a dollar a day. Worldwide, more<br></br>than 100 million people now receive microfinance, but not all of them are<br></br>below the dollar-a-day poverty line. Although microfinance is expanding all over the<br></br>world, probably fewer…</p>
<p>beijing paper 2007 Chapter 27<br/>Microfinance Interventions to Enable the Poorest to Improve Their Asset Base<br/>Fazle Hasan Abed</p>
<p><br/>Microfinance has proven an effective tool in alleviating poverty, particularly<br/>among the population living on less than a dollar a day. Worldwide, more<br/>than 100 million people now receive microfinance, but not all of them are<br/>below the dollar-a-day poverty line. Although microfinance is expanding all over the<br/>world, probably fewer than half of the people who have access to financial services<br/>through microfinance live on less than a dollar a day. The International Food Policy<br/>Research Institute has estimated that India has 70 million borrowers, of whom<br/>only about 6 million live on less than a dollar a day, suggesting that the majority of<br/>borrowers are above the dollar-a-day poverty line. These people are also poor and<br/>should not be ignored. These numbers suggest something that the experience of<br/>the Bangladeshi organization BRAC (Box 27.1) has shown to be true—that microfinance has not yet reached the large numbers of very poor people for whom access<br/>to finance would lead to better lives. When one is poor and has no money to start a<br/>small business that can help improve one’s life, access to finance is very important;<br/>it is kind of a dream come true.<br/>People also need a service that will help them save small sums of money for a<br/>rainy day. Even poor people practice saving in small quantities and would find it<br/>useful to have a safe place to put these savings, to which they could add in small<br/>amounts—a few cents every week.<br/>Therefore, there is a need for an institution that allows the poor to save and<br/>to borrow small sums of money when they need it. The actual amount borrowed<br/>would depend on the ability of their enterprise to generate income to repay the<br/>loan; the figure could be as low as US$50.00 or as high as, say, US$400.00 to <br/>US$500.00. This is the service provided by a microfinance institution, and it is one<br/>of the activities carried out by BRAC.<br/>How Microfinance Works<br/>How does microfinance work? Microfinance involves organizing poor individuals<br/>within a community into groups, encouraging them to save, and lending them small<br/>sums of money for which they are jointly liable. Amounts ranging from US$50.00<br/>to US$500.00, depending on the enterprise, are lent to individuals in these groups,<br/>340 fazle hasan abed<br/>Box 27.1 About BRAC<br/>BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) was founded to rehabilitate refugees returning to Bangladesh after the country’s 1971<br/>war of independence. BRAC soon faced the long-term task of improving the<br/>living conditions of the rural poor and expanded its work into fields such as<br/>income generation, health care, population control, and primary education<br/>for children. As BRAC grew, it targeted the landless poor, particularly women<br/>in rural Bangladesh, a large percentage of whom live below the poverty line<br/>with no access to resources. BRAC now works in more than 69,400 villages<br/>in Bangladesh and reaches more than 110 million poor people.<br/>BRAC employs a holistic approach to poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor through programs in health, education, and social and legal<br/>empowerment as well as economic development interventions such as microfinance. In BRAC’s work, empowerment of women is a precondition for<br/>sustainable poverty alleviation. So far, BRAC has organized about 7 million<br/>Bangladeshi women into more than 260,000 groups called Village Organizations. These groups form the basis for BRAC’s multifaceted programs,<br/>which seek to create an enabling environment in which the poor can participate in their own development and improve the quality of their lives. In 2007<br/>BRAC had disbursed more than US$4.6 billion in microcredit to its Village<br/>Organization members, with a recovery rate of 99.5 percent.<br/>In 2002, BRAC went international, using its early experience in the<br/>postwar reconstruction of Bangladesh to help a war-ravaged Afghanistan.<br/>In 2004 BRAC also registered as a foreign NGO in Sri Lanka to help the<br/>country get back on its feet after its eastern coastal provinces were virtually<br/>destroyed by the devastating tsunami. In 2006 BRAC launched operations<br/>in Africa—currently working in southern Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda—<br/>with plans to expand to several other countries over the next few years.<br/>who then repay the loans with interest in regular installments over a specified period<br/>of time, usually one year. Once the first loan is repaid, the borrowers are able to take<br/>further loans, which tend to be progressively larger. Gradually they improve their<br/>enterprise, increase their asset base, and lift themselves out of poverty. That is the<br/>standard microfinance model, and it works for most people.<br/>For some people—fewer than 10 or 15 percent of borrowers—it does not work,<br/>not because their enterprises have failed but because something unexpected has happened in their family, making it difficult for them to repay their loans. For example,<br/>the death or infirmity of the family’s main breadwinner may cause the borrowing<br/>household to default on loan repayments. As a result the borrowing household loses<br/>its access to microfinance and is not able to acquire any further financial support.<br/>To overcome these issues, BRAC has put in place several measures, including death<br/>benefits for borrowing households.<br/>Failure to repay a loan occurs in only a small percentage of cases, however. For<br/>the large majority of borrowers, microfinance has proven effective. It is the most<br/>effective intervention known to us for attacking poverty at the level of the household<br/>rather than the economy.<br/>Microfinance for the Ultra Poor<br/>The situation for the ultra poor, however, is quite different. BRAC’s definition of<br/>the ultra poor is not people living on less than 50 cents a day but those living on<br/>less than 35 cents a day. BRAC’s experience in working with more than 100,000<br/>households in Bangladesh that fall under its definition of ultra poor has shown<br/>that these families are not really microfinance clients. Existing microfinance group<br/>members within the village choose not to include these individuals in microfinance<br/>activities, saying, “No, she can’t repay her loan. She’s too poor. She is by herself,<br/>she has no husband. She works in other people’s houses, she has five children, she<br/>has no way of taking money and repaying a loan.”<br/>So what can be done about the ultra poor? BRAC has recognized that before<br/>providing microfinance to the ultra poor, it needs to invest in building up their<br/>capacity to fully use such mainstream development interventions. This investment<br/>involves transferring assets (such as livestock) to them through a grant—not a<br/>loan—of around US$150.00 and, while these assets are earning income, providing a small stipend for them to live on and to use to send their children to school.<br/>For 2 years BRAC “holds their hands,” allowing them to graduate out of ultra<br/>poverty into “tolerable poverty,” at which point they can become microfinance<br/>clients. As microfinance clients, they are able to graduate out of poverty using the<br/>standard microfinance framework described earlier.<br/>This is what it takes to lift the ultra poor out of poverty. It is an investment,<br/>whereas microfinance is a business. Microfinance institutions not only recover their<br/>enabling the poorest to improve their asset base 341<br/>capital but also earn interest, which allows them to cover their costs and, if they are<br/>successful, even make some profit so they can expand their portfolio. The ultra poor<br/>need a “ladder” so they can climb up to a level of poverty at which, through microfinance, they can work toward emerging from poverty. This is what BRAC is doing<br/>in Bangladesh with its program for the ultra poor. In 2002 the pilot intervention of<br/>asset transfer and stipend provision included 100,000 ultra-poor families and was<br/>supported with US$58 million of donor financing. Its success has allowed BRAC to<br/>expand the program to 800,000 ultra-poor families, and in 2006 it planned to spend<br/>US$188 million over the following 5 years (2007–11) to guide these families onto<br/>the road out of poverty.<br/>Institutions for Microfinance<br/>Which are the best organizations to offer microfinance—banks or microfinance<br/>institutions? If banks were able to provide microfinance, the extension of microfinance would be much easier given that banks are available all over the world.<br/>Banks, however, have a fundamentally different culture from institutions that<br/>provide microfinance services. Bankers do not go to villages seeking clients;<br/>rather people go to banks to borrow money and repay it. In contrast, microfinance<br/>institutions go to the villages, look for poor people, organize them into groups, and<br/>get them to start saving.<br/>One of the distinguishing features of the service provided by many microfinance<br/>institutions is the organizing of borrowers into groups. There is solidarity among<br/>microfinance group members, so if an individual member cannot pay this week’s<br/>installment, one of the other members will say, “All right, I will help you out this week,<br/>and if at some point in the future I don’t have enough money, you can help me.”<br/>The success of microfinance is due in large part to the group settings in which these<br/>programs operate. Individually, a poor person is powerless, but a group is powerful. A<br/>group not only facilitates access to finance and saving services but also offers a gateway<br/>into communities for approaching issues that affect them, such as the occurrence of<br/>disease. In an organized microfinance group, one member can be trained as a village<br/>health worker who can help her community deal with health issues such as dehydration and diarrhea. Microfinance builds a lot of social capital and trust between group<br/>members, the full potential of which has not yet been explored. Therefore, much more<br/>can be done to realize the full benefits of microfinance.<br/>“Microfinance Plus Plus”<br/>BRAC is not just a microfinance organization; it is a development organization. It<br/>operates what is called a “microfinance plus plus” program, which provides support<br/>342 fazle hasan abed<br/>in the form of linkages along the different points of a microenterprise’s supply chain.<br/>For example, when poor rural women borrow money to buy livestock, they often<br/>face several problems, including lack of proper feed and veterinary care as well as low<br/>demand for milk in rural areas and lack of access to more lucrative city and town<br/>markets. BRAC works with its borrowers who buy cows, giving them training in<br/>livestock rearing. BRAC’s poultry and livestock feed mills provide access to superiorquality animal feed, and its community extension workers provide door-to-door<br/>immunization and veterinary care. Through BRAC’s artificial insemination program<br/>the microentrepreneurs have access to better breeds of cows that yield more milk. On<br/>the other end of the supply chain, for its 400,000 borrowers who have bought cows,<br/>BRAC has put in place a system to collect milk from them, process it, and sell the final<br/>product to more viable city and town markets. Therefore, in addition to providing<br/>microfinance, BRAC also provides marketing and input support.<br/>Similarly, when 400,000 of its women borrowers were planting vegetable gardens<br/>but lacked access to good seeds, BRAC entered the seed business to provide them with<br/>high-quality seeds that help improve the productivity of their enterprises.<br/>Microfinance alone works well, but if it can go a bit beyond pure access to<br/>finance—the “plus plus”—by, for instance, connecting borrowers to the right enterprises, providing inputs, and marketing their products, microfinance has an even<br/>greater impact.<br/>Addressing Constraints to Microfinance Expansion<br/>Given the now well-known benefits of microfinance, it is useful to consider why it<br/>is not expanding exponentially throughout the world. Constraints to the expansion<br/>of microfinance and suggestions of ways to address them are as follows:<br/>1. Government regulation. In China, provincial permission is required to start a<br/>microfinance organization. Government regulation is fine, but the government should understand what it is trying to regulate. The governments of all<br/>countries should give microfinance organizations free rein to provide microfinance to the poorest people. It is important for government representatives,<br/>particularly in the central bank, to understand what microfinance is and what<br/>it can do for the poor.<br/>2. Institutional capacity. Some nongovernmental organizations are content to have<br/>30,000 borrowers. The philosophy at BRAC, however, is that although small may<br/>be beautiful, large is necessary. BRAC wants to reach millions of borrowers in order<br/>to make a significant impact given the scale of global poverty. Organizations should<br/>focus on building their capacity to quickly reach larger numbers of people.<br/>enabling the poorest to improve their asset base 343<br/>3. Wholesaling by banks. Banks should not be microfinance organizations, but they<br/>should be wholesalers, and microfinance institutions should be retailers. In other<br/>words, banks should offer financing to microfinance institutions.<br/>4. Training. To provide 200 or 300 million of the poorest people with access to<br/>microfinance it is crucial not only to understand the theoretical underpinning<br/>of how microfinance works but also to have large numbers of people who can<br/>go to a village to collect money, collect savings, and service loans. Training<br/>organizations are needed to develop the capacity of microfinance program staff.<br/>Universities, including some in Bangladesh, have started offering master’s of<br/>business administration degrees in microfinance to develop the quality of human<br/>resources involved in operating these programs</p>
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