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!

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please mail chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk bookmarks to great articles on BRAC 1
For those who want to sustain future generations, friends in DC, I (+93 congressmen) would recommend an adventure learning tour to 3 destinations. Fortunately, two of these are within walking distance of each other (Third is a hemisphere away in Africa, but they know each other well and thanks to death of distance are microeconomics map around your entrepreneurial and open source world as the most productive and collaborative triad ). For the sake of transparency, YES I feel I have some friends in one of these places, but this is a web about the place I haven't yet visited. Ian Smilie's new book starts its guided tour like this . Chris Macrae DC Bureau of microcredit.tv 301 881 1655, chris.macrae AT yahoo.co.uk
suggestions for editing bracase welcome - chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
This is a friends web -official webs of BRAC are http://www.brac.net/  http://www.bracuniversity.net/ http://www.bracbank.com/ http://www.bracusa.org/ http://www.youtube.com/user/bracusa1
I have spent 30 years surveying how purposefully organisations sustain their workers missions. BRAC and Grameen are off the scale compared with any large organisation I have researched - and I have surveyed more that half of the world's most famous global 100 brands.
We hope we have found a way to share with youth around the world the exciting intrapreneurial energy that Grameen http://grameen.tv/ generates day in day out

Muhammad Yunus & Grameen Bank

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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.
If anyone has ideas how we can do something similar for BRAC, I'd love to hear of them
Chris Macrae Washington DC bureau us tel 301 881 1655 info@worldcitizen.tv
The Worldwide Importance of BRAC & GRAMEEN
.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 businessesUntil 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. 

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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.

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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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Dear chris,

With all of my years working with BRAC and in development in general, I still find myself consistently blown away by the people we work with.  Last month in Liberia, I met Cecilia Doe, a formidable woman who took on the Firestone corporation to get rights to land where her community now leverages BRAC's tools and training to grow rice.  

Cecilia is Liberia's secret to success, and she's one of millions!  You can read below about how young girls in Uganda and Bangladesh are changing their communities as well.

In addition to the incredible women and girls BRAC works with in developing communities, there are also many wonderful volunteers and interns who commit their time to BRAC's mission.  I had a chance to meet with some of the summer interns at BRAC while in Bangladesh earlier this month, and was thoroughly impressed by this amazing group.  You can read posts from some of our interns in the US and in Bangladesh on our blog.

New and experienced, our interns and volunteers are part of the soul of this organization.  They are true ambassadors of BRAC.


Best wishes,
Susan
Susan Davis
President & CEO
BRAC USA
 

BRAC Partners with SMS Forum UReport in Uganda
BRAC was recently introduced to an initiative called Ureport. Initiated by UNICEF, Ureport is an SMS based forum designed to provide Ugandan youth with a platform to raise issues that concern them. The system uses mobile technology to allow youth to interact with each other and participate in a national dialog process.

BRAC Uganda has partnered with the Ureport initiative by including the members from their youth clubs. BRAC Uganda's Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents program has 690 clubs for adolescent girls and a further 100 Youth Development Centers under its Access to Health, Education and Youth Development program in Karamoja. About 26,500 adolescent girls in Uganda are now reached by these programs. Ureport is a great opportunity for BRAC to connect these girls through new mediums and a feedback based process. It fits nicely with our objective of supporting youth in becoming contributing members of their communities. Already more than 3,500 club members are being registered into the system along with nearly 9,000 young members from the microfinance and health programs. The hope is that these BRAC participants will spread the message and encourage others to join.

Click here to read the rest.

Insana's Story: A Student and a Teacher

Insana_BRAC%20SoFEA%20Girls%20Club%20Memter

Insana is 18 years old. She lives in a village in Kalampur, Dhamrai in Bangladesh.

When she was in Grade 10, Insana was forced to drop out of school, as her family was unable to bear the associated costs and needed one more hand to add to the meager family income. This was a big blow for Insana, as she enjoyed school and wanted to continue her education further. Nevertheless, in response to her family’s needs, Insana stopped going to school and started rearing some chicks and ducks to help support her family.

Insana was a member of a local SoFEA club, and her club mentor and the staff became aware of this and offered her the chance to enroll in a training program to learn tailoring. Although there was pressure from her family to find a higher earning job, Insana decided to take up the training.

Click here to read more of Insana's story.

Christy Turlington goes back to Bangladesh

This week, Christy Turlington Burns returned to Bangladesh for the first time since filming No Woman, No Cry, a documentary that follows the stories of four women who face the dangers of pregnancy. One of the stories Christy covers in her film is Monica, who is working with Yasmin, a BRAC Community Health Promoter, to ensure she has a safe pregnancy.

On the first day of her return, Christy talks with BRAC staff and visits our maternal health program in the slums of Dhaka, where she reunites with Yasmin.

Click here to read Christy's story of her first day back in Bangladesh. 

 
4:55 pm edt 


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