HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.
A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 65). This blog is a continuation of the review of FREEDOM FROM WANT: THE REMARKABLE SUCCESS STORY OF BRAC, THE GLOBAL GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION THAT’S WINNING THE FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY by Ian Smillie published 2009.
Huge enterprises staffed by tens of thousands of villagers
This book is about the triumph of optimism, enterprise, and common sense over despair; about development without borders; about one man and the incredible organization he created to deal with abject poverty in a broken country. BRAC has breached the borders of development orthodoxy, discovering the fallacies in standard approaches to community development. It has shown that completely destitute women in a conservative Muslim society can learn, earn, and lead. It has turned tiny experimental efforts into huge enterprises that are staffed almost exclusively by tens of thousands of villagers who once had nothing and whose own borders were once defined by ignorance, ill health, isolation, and fear.
The largest and most varied social experiment in the developing world
It is about inspired innovations in health, education, agriculture, and income generation that contribute to lasting change for tens and hundreds of thousands of people. It is about an organization that has exposed the deepest roots of human degradation, challenging old nostrums about the limits to change and showing what can be done, not in one or two model villages, but in tens of thousands. BRAC is the largest and most variegated social experiment in the developing world.
Four million children graduated from BRAC’s 68,000 schools
Four million children, 70% of them girls, have graduated from BRAC’s 68,000 primary and preprimary schools. Millions benefit from the work of BRAC’s health centers, its diagnostic laboratories, its health workers, and the 70,000 community health volunteers who have joined the effort.
Lending more than US$1 billion
BRAC’s microfinance operations loaned more than US$1 billion to poor people in 2008, achieving a repayment rate of more than 95%. BRAC developed a system for poultry vaccination, chick rearing, feed production, and chains of feed sellers and egg collectors, all village women, working at jobs financed by microcredit.
A central dairy processing 90,000 liters of milk a day
In the dairy sector, BRAC has improved cattle breeds through the establishment of 1,100 artificial insemination centers, education on cattle rearing, loans for the purchase of a million cows, 67 chilling plants, and a central dairy that processes 90,000 liters of milk a day. There are other stories like this in social forestry, silk production, fisheries, and prawn cultivation.
Revolutionizing education and communication
BRAC operates a bank, a university, a housing finance corporation, tea companies, feed mills, an internet provider with wireless broadband technology, revolutionizing education and communication. In 1980, BRAC’s US$780,000 budget was covered entirely by donors. By 2006, its income, not counting its microfinance operations, was US$495 million, only 20% provided by donor organizations.
BRAC’s founder gave up a senior management job at Shell Oil
In 1972 BRAC’s founder, Fazle Hasan Abed, gave up a senior management job at Shell Oil, to supply emergency relief to cyclone and war victims. Later he gathered an impressive team of dedicated men and women who provided leadership in risk management, innovation, quality control, and learning. By the 1990s, it was tackling the problems of urban slums as well as rural poverty. BRAC is an acronym standing for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, but also a motto ‘Building resources across communities.’
BRAC is the largest NGO in Afghanistan
Today, BRAC is the largest NGO in Afghanistan, operating not just in the safe northern areas, but in the embattled provinces of the south. In Tanzania, Uganda, and the Sudan, it is demonstrating that the apparent limits to African development have been artificial. Fresh vision, determination, and an ability to learn are turning BRAC from a newcomer in Africa into something of a prodigy.
What developers must learn to end poverty
This book challenges the idea that NGOs must be small. It turns standard notions about development, business, poverty alleviation, and management on their head. It is about the entire development enterprise and what it must learn if it is to end poverty.