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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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Friday, May 15, 2009 headline stats from new book on brac
Help us with worldwide brand seeding of 5000 youth goodwill ambassador network uniting bangladesh and worldwide mapmakers of microeconomics, social business entrepreneur networking and future capitalism's sustainability investments -next project meeting all day+1 birthday party with dr yunus , dhaka, 29 June 2009 - help us track the best for the world news that brac and grameen are helping peoples celebrate- spring 09.1 IDCOL to Produce Solar Panels in Bangladesh Energy Bangla - Apr 24, 2009 The IDCOL CEO said the programme is being implemented through 15 partner organisations (POs)
-- Grameen Shakti, BRAC Foundation, Srizony Bangladesh, ...
Freedom From Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, The Global Grassroots Organization that’s Winning the Fight Against Poverty April 2009 / 304 pages / Paperback / 978-1-56549-294-3 / $24.95 mapmaker's data from the book's freedom chapters coming soon Freedom C0 & C2
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8:30 am edt From BRAC's earliest dev plans in 1972, the idea was to make entire adult populations of villages literate. However BRAC soon learned that education was about far more than schools and etachers. Functional education soon emerged as an underlying fundamental in BRAC's organising principles. The first step in enetring a village was to identify households in BRAC;s target group of the poorest adults. Ater a few weeks several programs for men and women would form- while a saving group might be one of these, the basic platform on which everything was built wss functinal education. Fazle Abed devoured writings from 3 educational practitioners with the poorests: Paulo Freire, Franz Fanon, and Ivan Illich There were 2 parts to the functional education course that emerged in the 1970s. The first part delivered in 30 sessions was about awareness, helping villagers to analyse their environment ,their relationships and dependencies, and the consrants and possibilities in their lives. The objectve was to build a sense of solidarity and group cohesion, create a savings mentality, and prepare people for income generating projects and other activities that would come with time. The seconf part was about literacy and numeracy also taught in 30 courses that were 3 hours each. In the early 1980s the literacrynumeracy course became optional as literacy for its own sake was not alwayys found to be useful. BRAC was soon asked waht it could do for children. From 1974 it started publishing a monthly childrens magazine with stories particularly on health and social issues. By 1981 this was being distributed to all of the states 40000+ primary schools. BRAC soon decided it needed to experiment with informal one-toom primary schools in the village. Its 1985 experiment began with 22 1-room schools. .. Ten years later, BRAC had opened 19000 schools and had graduated more than 500,000 chldren. Update from BRAC blog march 09 :BRAC has more than 54,000 primary and pre-primary schools in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Uganda and Southern Sudan, and will be implementing a pilot primary school program in Pakistan this year. Click here to learn more about BRAC's education programs Freedom C15
8:30 am edt Freedom C16 BRAC UNIVERSITY
8:30 am edt University Revolution - I will make a guess that by 2020 if Yes We Can youth have got the lanet spinning back on track for sustainability that half of the top 10 universities will have been all but unknown in 2009; the simplest course that 7 billion people need to regain sustainability doesn't need 1000 expert professors variations; and its cases will be there to go and visit; I have no doubt that BRAC University will be a world favourite - note how fast its grownn and gravitates sustainability's most caring systems people from 2008 BRAC annual report  Freedom C17
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5:56 pm edt BRAC"s pathway to Africa In 2004, BRAC won the Bill & Melinda Gates $1mn Award for Global Health, and with 18 months funding was enough for to take BRAC to Tanzania for 5 years with a total of$15 mn. TANZANIA The infrastructures being built are agricultural (no irrigation yet in Tanzania) and poultry/livestock sector BRAC will start microfinace in 55 regions each with 5 btanches; health product retailers will be some of the early microentrepreneurs funded. Typically their products wil be : mosquito nets and repellants, water purifination tablets, condoms and non-prescription drugs. In due cousre, BRAC will introduce a rapid detection test for malaria with results in 15 minutes. Microfinace data updated to start 2009 is 80,000 members networked round 3000 groups. UGANDA In this case seed money came from the Netherland;s NOVIB, who also got UNICEF support for educational programs. A 25 person training centre in kampala was the beginning. Microfinance began in June 2006, and within a year they were one of the largest programs. Schools were started in the Northerm districts where 2.68 million people had been displaced by conflicts and security remains poor. SOUTH SUDAN BRAC is committed to taking this on as the toughest of its current fovci in Africa Freedom Chapter 21
5:20 pm edt 1 Social Businesses this book did not have space to report: 23,000 hectacres of ponds and lakes with fish and prawn hatcheries 8000 village nurseries which produce over 15 million seedlings a year how BRAC's human rights and legal aid programs are supported by 400 theatre groups who stage over 50000 plays a year, educating as they entertain 2 Bangladesh Organisation - 3000 offices with 57000 employees- triple that if you included its grassroots networks of nurses and teachers 3 Further notes on International spread of BRAC: sri lanka: went there after the tsumai to help with relief assistance as it often has to in Bangladesh; through time this has turned into development work has established fundraising arms in New York and London; in US BRAC has assembled fund of $70 million by 2009 for microfinance in Africa is working in haiti and pakistan; exploring potential of operations in I ndia, China, Liberia, Sierra Leone Sunday, May 10, 2009 headline stats from new book on brac
Freedom From Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, The Global Grassroots Organization that’s Winning the Fight Against Poverty April 2009 / 304 pages / Paperback / 978-1-56549-294-3 / $24.95 |
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