BRAC Founder Fazle Hasan Abed Knighted

It’s hardly worth mentioning that the accomplishments of Bangladesh and Bangladeshis does not register within the international media. That is so, but for that one Bangladeshi, Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.  Indeed, it happens that Dr. Yunus is fast friends with former President William J. Clinton.  

Without a doubt the Grameen Bank’s brand of microfinance loans has done much to alleviate extreme poverty in Bangladesh and in other parts of the world, including the United States.  But it taints the tongue to think that even in the rarified field of humanitarians, connections make all the difference.

Maybe that was yesterday’s story.  Recently, Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC, the fastest growing and the largest NGO in Bangladesh and in the world, was honored with a knighthood.   Perhaps, this event, more than Muhammad Yunus’s and Grameen Banks’ award of the Nobel speaks to the lively humanitarian work that is going on in Bangladesh, to such splendid effect.

As the Economist writes:

“Although Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel peace prize in 2006 for helping the poor, his Grameen Bank was neither the first nor the largest microfinance lender in his native Bangladesh; BRAC was. Its microfinance operation disburses about $1 billion a year. But this is only part of what it does: it is also an internet-service provider; it has a university; its primary schools educate 11% of Bangladesh’s children. It runs feed mills, chicken farms, tea plantations and packaging factories. BRAC has shown that NGOs do not need to be small and that a little-known institution from a poor country can outgun famous Western charities. In a book on BRAC entitled “Freedom from Want”, Ian Smillie calls it ‘undoubtedly the largest and most variegated social experiment in the developing world. The spread of its work dwarfs any other private, government or non-profit enterprise in its impact on development.'”

“None of this seemed likely in 1970, when Sir Fazle turned Shell’s offices in Chittagong into a refuge for victims of a deadly cyclone. BRAC—which started as an acronym, Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, and became a motto, “building resources across communities”—surmounted its early troubles by combining two things that rarely go together: running an NGO as a business and taking seriously the social context of poverty.”

So how is Sir Fazle Hasan Abed’s accomplishment any different than Dr. Yunus’?  As in the Grameen model,  “women became the institution’s focus because they are bottom of the heap and most in need of help: 70% of the children in BRAC schools are girls. Microfinance encourages the poor to save but, unlike the Grameen Bank, BRAC also lends a lot to small companies. Tiny loans may improve the lot of an individual or family but are usually invested in traditional village enterprises, like owning a cow. Sir Fazle’s aim of social change requires not growth (in the sense of more of the same) but development (meaning new and different activities). Only businesses create jobs and new forms of productive enterprise.”

The Economist article questions whether, as has already been the case, the BRAC model can be exported successfully into other poor countries.   Perhaps BRAC has been successful in the context in which it first arose, an organization that placed between the market and the thousands of villages that dot the Bangladeshi country-side.  No matter. We do not, now, need to wonder whether the BRAC model will work in Afghanistan or Uganda, though that might be a important concern.  It suffices, finally, that BRAC has worked in Bangladesh.  That is accomplishment enough.

(For a broader and more celebratory editorial piece on Sir Fazle Hasan Abed and BRAC, read the Daily Star article here.)