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4 April 2012 Dhaka, The Japanese Embassy Graciously Hosts a Remembrance Event of The Economist's Unacknowledged Giant - chief guest from the net generation''s world of education is Sir Fazle Abed. Joyful Economic revolutions Norman Macrae quest for 3 billion jobs seeks more good news on from Bangladesh at 41 include - digital cash www.bkash.com and with Sainsbury family at www.ashden.org green energy and bottom to top education revolutions
do you have a perspective of what BRAC collaborates around youth and their millennium goal futures with the million times more collaboration technology this new century is blessed with? that you would like the world to debate - sample perspectives below
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As BRAC Turns 40, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed Calls for Education Reform and Youth Development for
Poor Countries Outdated approaches to teaching must give way to modern schooling that prepares the poor for a 21st century knowledge society, says founder of the world's largest development organization.. BRAC representatives from 12 countries gather on stage at the
organization's 40th anniversary celebrations in Dhaka I am
sorry to say that patriarchy remains entrenched in our social and religious practices. Dhaka,
Bangladesh (PRWEB) March 02, 2012 Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of the world’s largest development organisation, BRAC, called for innovative
solutions to address the needs of the burgeoning youth population in developing countries in an address delivered in February
celebrating the 40th anniversary of BRAC. As dignitaries gathered in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to celebrate BRAC’s 40th birthday, Sir Fazle, who founded the
organisation in 1972, announced a new youth strategy as BRAC scales up operations in 10 African, Asian and Caribbean countries.
He also called for doing away with “outdated approaches to teaching” in the developing world, calling most public
education systems in the developing world unsuitable for preparing students for the 21st century knowledge society. “You will be happy to learn
that BRAC is in the process of developing a comprehensive strategy to help the vibrant, innovative and entrepreneurial younger
generation of today to realize their potential, and be the agents of change within their communities,” Sir Fazle said. The chairperson, who could not attend
the gathering for health reasons but delivered the address via a spokesperson for the organization, called for education reform
in poor countries. “Unfortunately, public education systems in most developing countries are unfit and unsuited to prepare
our youth for the 21st century knowledge society that we must aspire to,” he said. “Outdated approaches to teaching must give way to new techniques that teach our children not to memorize texts,
but to think critically and solve problems creatively. We must give greater thought, and direct greater resources towards
early childhood development, and social and emotional learning.” BRAC is the largest secular, private education provider in the world, with over
5 million students having graduated from its alternative primary schools, dubbed “second chance” schools targeting
those left behind by official educational systems. Sir Fazle has been hailed as an innovator in the field of education, winning
the inaugural WISE Prize for Education in Qatar, styled as a Nobel for the field of education, last year. In his speech, BRAC’s
chairperson spoke of the “remarkable” progress of the organisation’s home country, Bangladesh, “in
almost every major indicator of human development” over the last 40 years. “Today, the progress we have made is
the envy of most of the developing nations in South Asia and beyond,” he said. Infant mortality, for instance, has dropped from 200 per 1,000 live births to less
than 50, and maternal mortality from 800 deaths per 100,000 live births to less than 200. Fertility rates have fallen dramatically
as well: The average Bangladeshi mother now has just 2.7 children as opposed to 6.5 in 1972. Literacy rates have risen from
25 percent to over 65 percent. “While it is true that no single organization can take credit for this amazing turnaround, we at BRAC can nevertheless
take great pride in the role that we have played in support of governmental efforts to bringing about these successes,”
says Sir Fazle. “From immunizing children to popularizing the use of oral rehydration therapy, from providing essential
healthcare through a cadre of barefoot health volunteers to providing safe places for mothers to give birth, from curing tuberculosis
to improving sanitation, BRAC’s work in public health has contributed to each of our country’s achievements in
the health sector.” Sir Fazle, who turns 76 this year, called on BRAC to remain a “trailblazing organization” as the leadership
baton passes to a younger generation. “In these twilight years of my life, I feel a sense of comfort and satisfaction
in knowing that we have an able and competent leadership team at BRAC,” he said. “I am confident that this team
will ensure BRAC achieves even greater success and impact when I call time on providing leadership to this organization that
I have built.” A champion of girls’ education and the empowerment of women, Sir Fazle lamented the relative lack of progress
in those areas. “Gender equality remains the greatest unfinished agenda not only of my life’s work but of our
time. Although we have worked for the last 40 years to try to ensure that all citizens can live with dignity and respect and
enjoy equal rights as human beings, I am sorry to say that patriarchy remains entrenched in our social and religious practices.”
Notes on Hasan family linked by wikipedia bio of sir
fazle abed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazle_Hasan_Abed The Hasan Family also
spelled Hassan, is an esteemed Bangladeshi family, who have contributed exceptionally
to South Asian politics and various social movements for nearly four-hundred years. The seat of
this Zamindar family is located in Baniachang, Sylhet near the town of Habiganj. The family is
one of the remaining remnants of the nobility of the Mughal Courtto exist in Bangladesh, with their ancient home still intact.According to legend,
the family is of Arab and Persian descent, supposedly from the lineage of Abu Bakr, the first Sunni Caliph and father-in-law of Prophet Muhammad. The first known Hasan was sent to Bengal by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. Obaid Ul Hasan: Grand
Vizier to the Nizam of Hyderabad Syedul Hasan: Communist
activist, killed by Pakistani soldiers for protecting Hindu families during Bangladesh's War of Liberation Sir Fazle Hasan Abed: Founder and Chairman of BRAC, the world's largest NGO Barrister Manzoor Hasan: Celebrated lawyer and activist. Awarded Order of the British Empire for his role in combatting corruption in Bangladesh Meheriar Munim Hasan: Executive Vice President of US Bank Corporation. Highest ranked Bangladeshi bank executive in the Western Hemisphere. Nahid Hasan: Director of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. Celebrated businesswoman of Bangladesh. Tamara Abed: Head of Aarong, a retail enterprise | .....................................................................http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15546976 Fairness challenge from first global education 'laureate'There isn't a Nobel Prize for education. But this month has seen the launch of an award that would like to have such
a similar international status. The inaugural
World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Prize was announced in Doha, Qatar, with the $500,000 (£310,000) award
being given to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, whose work has brought education to millions of children in impoverished families. Sir Fazle, the first education "laureate", has worked
across decades and continents to help communities to escape the quicksand of poverty and to gain skills and self-reliance. Created in Bangladesh in 1972, his BRAC project - formerly the
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee - is now claimed as the biggest non-governmental organisation in the world. An estimated 10 million primary pupils have been taught in schools
set up by Brac across 10 countries, in such tough territories as South Sudan and Afghanistan. It's a vast operation, running more schools in Bangladesh than the entire English school system, and it is claimed
to be the "largest private, secular education system in the world". Equal chances Working with the poorest, most disadvantaged rural communities, often blighted with conflict, exploitation and disease,
this is the raw edge of education, with one-room classrooms and basic skills.  First day at school in a BRAC project in Manderia village in Torid, South
Sudan But speaking
after the award, Sir Fazle says that the greatest challenge for global education applies as much to the more affluent countries
as to the poorest. And that big problem, he says, is inequity, the stubborn link between family income and educational outcome. "A child born in a poor household has less chance of going
to university than a child born in a wealthy household, in almost every society. "So how do we remove this inequity? Every child should have the same opportunity." BRAC works to alleviate poverty on a broad range of fronts - from micro-credit to health schemes - but he says that
education is becoming ever more important. "It's
so important for our survival, our progress, that every country wants to put more resources into education." This isn't simply about economic progress, as he links education
and literacy to the building of self-worth and self-help for individuals and communities. It provides the key to understanding
"the power structure and how to change it". Life changing His own commitment to development stemmed from the life-changing experience of the cyclone that hit Bangladesh in
1970. It turned an accountant into an activist.  Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was awarded the inaugural WISE Prize for international
education "Many
people died, and I saw the loss of many people, the corpses lying in the fields. That changed my philosophy, I found that
life was so fragile, you could die so easily. That changed my values about what kind of life I should lead," he says. This was compounded by the "death and destruction"
he saw during the war that accompanied Bangladesh's independence. Such experiences profoundly affected him and pushed him to view his country "from the point of view of the poor".
It made him "determined to achieve change", he says. The award of the first WISE Prize was part of a wider event, the World Innovation Summit for Education. This WISE summit wants to be a kind of Davos for education,
bringing together the great and the good to hear about innovation in schools and universities. It's supported by the Qatar Foundation, which has the succinct ambition to "convert the country's current, but
temporary, mineral wealth into durable human capital". This translates as investing heavily in education and becoming
a knowledge hub so that there's something of value left when the oil revenue eventually runs out. It's
a fast-forward project with parallels to creating the infrastructure for the World Cup. There is a 1,000 hectare Education City being developed, attracting university partners from the United States, France and the UK. Missed goals But big international promises, played out under the photographs
and rhetoric of summits, can also turn out to be hollow.  Gordon Brown issued a call for a "global education fund" at the
summit in Qatar Gordon
Brown, former UK prime minister and one of the speakers at the WISE event, delivered a blunt recognition that some of the
Millennium Development Goals for 2015 were going to be missed. "We know it is now impossible, I'm afraid, to achieve the Millennium Development Goal that would cut infant
mortality by half - we are too far away." There were other goals, signed by leading countries,
that were going to be missed, he said. But he
called on governments, charities and philanthropists to mobilise to achieve the goal of universal primary education by 2015
- and proposed a "global fund for education". Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales was among the WISE speakers and Mr Brown called on technology companies, such as Microsoft,
Apple, Google and Facebook to play a part in bringing education to the "poorest part of the poorest country". "We can reinforce in people's minds that when the world
makes a promise, it is not a promise that is casually set aside and betrayed for millions of children of future generations,
but a promise that we do everything in our power to keep," Mr Brown told the audience in Qatar. He said that governments had to be held to their funding promises - and "where countries fall behind, we should
be telling them that this is not acceptable". There's a long way to go as one sobering
statistic from BRAC makes clear. In 2011, when international conferences in the Gulf can be broadbanded round the world in
seconds, it's still more likely that a girl in South Sudan will die in childbirth than finish primary school. |
Tune in to ABC Friday, Dec. 16, at 10 pm (EST) for a "20/20" special with Diane Sawyer featuring BRAC – and Rina, a new mother who lives in a slum in Bangladesh.
Bearing a child should be the happiest day of a woman life – but too often, for reasons that are entirely preventable, it ends in the death of the mother, the child, or both. BRAC has figured out a low-cost yet ingenious solution for reducing pregnancy risk, reaching 24.5 million people in the process. That's the population of the state of Texas.
In “Making Life: A Risky Proposition,” an hour-long report on challenges faced by mothers in developing countries, ABC News travels to the slums of Dhaka, seeing our work in action – including a visit to a BRAC birthing hut to welcome the new arrival of Rina's healthy baby boy. The report is part of ABC News's Million Moms Challenge.
Show your support today by "liking" the Million Moms Challenge on Facebook. If they reach 100,000 likes by noon today, Johnson & Johnson will donate $100,000 to the cause – so please like
and share with your Facebook friends!
We’re making a real difference, and we believe we can multiply our
efforts by spreading the BRAC approach worldwide. So tune into ABC on Friday and help us spread the good news!
Muhammad Yunus & Grameen Bank
| Fazle Hasan Abed Founder and Chairperson, BRAC Fazle Hasan Abed is the Founder and Chairperson of BRAC, one of the largest non-governmental organizations in the world with over 100,000 staff members and an annual budget of $430 million. BRAC’s micro-finance program has 6.37 million borrowers and has cumulatively disbursed more than $4 billion. More than a million children are enrolled in BRAC schools and more than 3.67 million have graduated. BRAC’s health program reaches more than 100 million people. BRAC has, in recent years, taken its range of development interventions to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and Southern Sudan. Abed has been recognized through a number of awards, including UNICEF’s Maurice Pate Award, the Olof Palme Prize, Schwab Foundation’s Social Entrepreneurship Award, the Gates Award for Global Health, UNDP’s Mahbub-ul-Haq Award, and the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership. |
| .The entrepreneurial leaders and co-wrkers of BRAC and Grameen have demonstrated that poverty is not the fault of people , women and children but a failed system. It is inhuman for a child to be born into a place where it has 20% chance of dying before the age of 5 due to villages not having local nurses. BRAC's first solution in the 1970s was oral rehydration - a service that village nurses needed to provide when babies had diarrhea. Its inhuman for children to have no access to primary education - BRAC's second main service requiring a teacher in every rural area. Grameen completed this hi-trust local triangle by providing a banker in every community empowering women with credit and peer to peer support to start small entrepreneurial businesses | Until the internet's technology, the world's people and their productive lifetimes had been more separated by the geography of where they lived than interconnected. My father, one of the West's leading microeconomists clarified in 1984 how one generation (1984-2024) would become worldwide connected for the first time. This is the greatest system change ever to hit one generation of the human race. System change can always spiral one of two extremely opposite compound consequences not something in between. It was clear in 1984 that if the 21st Century is to be the best of times for all peoples on this planet then we must share life-critical knowhow in non-zero sum ways, end poverty by bridging digital divides. The millennial goals provide a pretty clear map of what ending extreme poverty simultaneously around the world entails | .In July 07 within weeks of becoming UK Prime Minster Gordon Brown give a very clear storyline "people power" of what our institutions have not yet started to transform towards if millennial goals are to be met and local communities are to have an equitable opportunity of being integrated into globalisation. He updated this a little over a year later at Clinton Global Initiative - at a time where fellow keynote speakers -Obama and Mccain - both deplored the excesses of global top-down systems such as wall Street's failed banks - and pledged they would commit America to returning to millennial goals. Ironically, there's a lot every nation can learn from ensuring that communities have banks investing in local people's ability to generate jobs. We are at a stage in human history where the kinds of jobs of the future are changing just as fast as when the industrial revolution emerged. But this time it is pure manufacturing jobs that are disappearing. Brown was correct in visioning an age where government should not promise anyone that their old jobs are safe but should be promising people structures in which everyone has access to developing new jobs. In the midst of this families and children in any civilized place need the same rights that BRAC and Grameen have pioneered :n channeling local medical support, local teachers, local bankers, connection to the worldwide, collaboration spaces in which people peer to peer learn vocational skills. | . In this tv interview, Clinton explains how the micro sustainability investment networks that have emerged in Bangladesh primarily because of the leadership examples and micro-entrepreneurial facilitation structured designed by Grameen and BRAC provide a benchmark for developing nations in our internetworked local to global economy. They have transparently distributed what top-down government and mass media could not equitably empower. For 30 years now, Grameen and BRAC have modeled themselves round social busienss constitutions. These are the opposite how the traditional charity dollar is spent and then needs to fundraise all over again. The social busienss dollar endlessly recycles its investment in an organization’s service purpose. It does this by insisting people entrepreneurially attend to a positive cashflow but reinvest that back inside the community. The safest way to ensure that owners have no conflict with such continuous reinvestment in development is to constitute the organization as owned by the poorest in the community. While Grameen's origin has been to focus on areas where people could serve each other whilst generating income, the origin of BRAC was, in effect, micro-privatization - doing a better job for the poorest communities with public funds than a bureaucratic or corrupt government. BRAC's Fazel Abed has probably innovated more reliable service franchises around vital needs than anyone alive today. Whereas Grameen's leadership team around Muhammad Yunus has serially introduced the most extraordinary entrepreneurial revolutions. Each of microcredit , micromobile and micro-energy involved planting a long-term investment exponential but one that literally took rural economies to a higher future level - a pathway not just to ending poverty but leaping sufficiently far ahead that even cyclical natural disasters would not push the next generation back under the poverty line There is an opportunity for egovernment to make this openness and representation of cultures that unite round the golden rule of all major religions. Do unto others what you would wish done unto you. | . Today national strategic dialogues co-chaired by leaders like Abed and Yunus make fascinating reading. In effect, Bangladesh has become the country par excellence in developing sustainable community franchises that end poverty and its boundary environmental challenges. It is evident that its fast growing neighbours India and China will need these services just as much as Bangladesh. The world in effect is finding that Bangladesh is the number 1 exporter of solutions that accelerate accomplishment of millennial goals everywhere as well as developing the sorts of entrepreneurial and job-creating education that all future children need. Educators have spotted that the schooling system the west built has its design origins in western empire's ancient industrial needs, when it was assumed that a few per cent would be promoted to a command and control top, and schools would sift out the vast majority as not talented enough to have their competences invested in. This is the ultimate challenge that the whole world needs change if we are to honor every child's potential from the day she or he is born. If we fully understand the benchmarks that BRAC and Grameen offer us by partnering grassroots networks such as theirs in Future Capitalism, then today's adult generation may yet hand on the best of times to all our future chldrens. Ultimately children are the deepest sustainability investment and a very micro one. Not the sort of flow that macro institutions like Wall Street banks ever got close to appreciating. We need new economic maps. Ones that worldwide networkers can collaboratively search out if mass media puts on reality program in which youth the world over wants to be "The Apprentice" of community entrepreneurs like Abed and Yunus and the 100000 Bangladeshi's+ they have inspired to be community facilitators of microentrepreneurship. |
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Saturday, June 25, 2011
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