when it comes to uniting 8 billion brains sustainably, english has advanages and disadvantage;s it went from the poetry of bard 1 to way admiistrators claimed to use scientifiuc method to (at peak) boss over 25% of the world population; suddenly bankrupted by world war 2 if you would like to see what 1 billion asian women did about this look at their toop 30 coperation ideas at abed mooc; if you want to see back in 1843 is both how ideas first described analytic machines as artificial (ie man-made not nature made) and how this might of integrated with the economists founder in 1843 of systems queen voctoria needed to humanise her empire you might start at economistdaiory.com (you should know that james hiuself doied in calcutta of diarrhea - and it took 112 yeras to massively network parental solutions to diarheas as number 1 killer in tropics) ; if you want to see today's views you might start at bard.solar or economistlearning.com or alumnisat.com or tell us where you like to start) rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
Friends of Fazle Abed study world class scaling of what we now call UN Sustainability Goals but Abed in 1972 first called Goal 1 Poverty alleviation when he founded BRA-C (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Collabs so that Bangladesh became the first nation empowered by poorest village women. Start with 3 favorite wESG (womens Entrepreneurial Scaling Goals : human collaborations of 100K ::1billion :: 50million

  • *** 100000 lives matter eg 5.1 metavillage= 1972

  • ...***1billion girls action networking -eg 3.1 oral rehydration

  • ***50 million graduate Apps: 5.4 purpose of first 100 new unis of sdg generation
1billiongirls.com - over the last half century the greatest human development miracle (extra ref schumacher 1 million bilages) has been networked by 1 billion poorest asian village women -here we invite you to help map the 30 collaborations they linkedin - their chief guide 2019-1970 the former oil company executive fazle abed- In spite of being pivotal to how one quarter of all human beings progressed (and by far the deepest co-creators of Sustainability goal solutions- nobody ever printed any paper money for them - its only since innovating the world's largest cashless banking 1.5 systems that many westerners even began to study 21st C happiest possibilities with them.
Out of Bangladesh, village mothers hired 100000 village coaches - webbed 30 collaborations - giant leaps for womankind & youth as first sustainability generation
Intergenerational collaboration entrepreneur platforms 5.1  metavillage sustainable community building - women empowered:15000 families at a time;5.2   billion asian women,5.3  brac net; 5.4   asian universities share sdg graduates 5.5  climate smart village exchanges,5.6 meta and zoom-me up scotty
BANK FOR ALL 1.1  1.2  1.3   1.4   1.5   1.6 celebrate 30 most human collaborations from developing world of last half-century - inspiring  anyone valuing UN and youth as first sustainability generation
EDUCATION  adult village entrepreneurs 4.1; primary 4.2  ; teen 4.3; university4.4 ; pre-school4.5;tech multidisciplinary luminaries 4.6 
HEALTH oral rehydration 3.1 ;para health "doordash" basic meds 3,2; scale vaccination3.3 ;tuberculosis & 3.4  Frugal processes eg wash sanitation, maternity3.5  ; James Grant School of public health 3.6
FOOD/land security 2.1  rice; 2.2 veggie  2.3    cash crops & village fair; 2.4  poultry;2.5  dairy, 2,6  14 nation leading supply chains financial opportunities to end poverty ;

UN says: Today's Education Systems No Longer Fit for PurposeAt Economistdiary.com we search out collaboration events- most exciting in 2022 - UN total transformation of education -september NY; Neumann's families collaboration search AI Hall of Fame; fen ale owners of transmedia race to humanise the metaverse...
abedMOOC.com started from a brainstorming dinner convened by Japan Ambassador to Dhaka who noticed my father's surveys of Asia Rising begun with Japan 1962 (endorsed by JF Kennedy) had not completely detailed Bangladesh Rural Advancement's  contributions to sustaining humanity and celebrating nation building through women empowerment . Dad's last public birthday party had celebrated launch of Muhammad Yunus Global Social Business Book February 2008 with 40 guests at Royal Automobile Club, St James, London. Father had also paid for sampling 2000 of Yunus books, 10000 dvds (youtube style interviews with all grameen directors during summer 2008 when the Nobel judges opened Yunus Museum in Mirpur, as well as part of launch of 2 Journals by Adam Smith Scholars in Glasgow that had emerged from Yunus making the 250th keynote speech on Adam Smith Moral Sentiments Dec 2008. But Fazle Abed whom my father never got the chance to meet had started 11 years before Yunus Grameen Bank 1983 Ordinance , built health and agricultural foundations, and then schooling -altogether a 5 dimensions approach that was not possible to appreciate from onee dimensional microcreditsummit yunus the clintons, queen Sofia staged annually from 1997. Abed said we could do a Mooc if it was laid out round C for collaborations. He was keen to map how 6  Collabs per the 5 primary sdgs had been integrated through 2 quarters of a century 1972-1995 when rural meant no electricity grids or phones; 1995 when partnering platforms afforded extraordinary leapfrog models that could be designed with mobile networks and solar. It took 16 trips while Abed was alive (and the curiosity og many graduate journalists _ to get this mooc started, and we still try to update it even as Abed left the world in Dec 2019. We welcome corrections and omissions. We have attempted here to map the deepest economic miracle

Thursday, December 31, 2009

2009 interview with abed 1.4 includes 3 investors that started brac bank and gabv.org

 Interview http://www.ifpri.org/PUBS/newsletters/IFPRIForum/if24/if24abed.asp

Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder and Chairman of BRAC (formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee)

IFPRI Forum talks with Fazle Hasan Abed about BRAC’s activities to benefit the poor in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Africa.

FORUM: BRAC, which is one of the largest nongovernmental development organizations in the world, has strong programs that target the poorest. How have these clients been affected by the food price crisis and the current financial turmoil?

Abed: In Bangladesh, nearly 40 percent of the population is poor and 20 percent is extremely poor. The poor spend 70 percent of their income on food, and nearly 40 percent on rice, the dominant staple food. During 2007-08, the price of rice increased by 60 percent and the price of edible oil almost doubled. Since the level of consumption of rice must be maintained to meet energy needs, the increase in rice prices forced the poor to spend more on rice and cut back on other food items, both in terms of quantity and quality. This has resulted in adverse nutritional outcomes, especially for children. It has also had a negative effect on children’s school participation.

A BRAC study on the impact of rising food prices found that between 2006 and 2008, there was a 9 percentage-point increase in wasting among children under 5 and a 10 percentage-point increase in the proportion of underweight children. This has caused about 650,000 more children under the age of 5 to become malnourished in the short term. Given the already high and obstinate levels of child malnourishment in Bangladesh, this trend is very worrying.

BRAC now reaches almost 7 million mostly poor households with programs on health, education, and microfinance. One specific program on eliminating extreme poverty targets the bottom 10 percent of households—households that remain outside the purview of most anti-poverty programs. Its main aim is to develop capacity for income generation by providing a minimum amount of assets, along with intensive training and supervision on the effective use of those assets, for two years. It is expected that after the two-year period, those households will be able to sustain the gains achieved through participation in labor and tenancy markets and in microfinance programs, and can emerge out of the poverty trap. A “quick and dirty” monitoring of the coping mechanism for the escalation in food prices found that beneficiaries who have been with this program for a longer period did better in coping with the crisis.

FORUM: The current financial and economic crisis poses serious challenges to countries, rich and poor, across the globe. BRAC is very active in banking with and for the poor. How has BRAC itself been affected and how will BRAC’s priorities or approach change in response to the crisis?

Abed: The current financial and economic crisis will increase the cost of loan funds for microfinance. This will reduce the small amount of surplus that we generate from the microfinance program, which is reinvested for social-sector services such as education and health, for which we cannot charge our beneficiaries. Nearly 20 percent of our budget of about US$450 million is financed with grants from development partners. We have not yet faced any problem in mobilizing this support, but we remain concerned about the decline of grants in the future if the global financial crisis continues.

Finding ways to increase our efficiency through management restructuring and greater use of technology will be key to the new business model of pro-poor microfinance. The right type of regulatory arrangement that will enable microfinance institutions to mobilize voluntary savings and take advantage of emerging technological opportunities is also an important ingredient for the new business model for microfinance.

FORUM: BRAC has recently expanded to several countries in Africa. In what ways do lessons from your experiences in Bangladesh apply and not apply in the African context?

Abed: The key elements of BRAC’s approach to comprehensive rural development and poverty alleviation are piloting in response to an emerging challenge; learning, adapting and innovating from the experience; and scaling up to achieve national-level impact. BRAC believes in flexibility in operations, attention to detail, learning from mistakes, necessity for change, continuous training for capacity enhancement of staff, and sensitivity to local cultural values and customs. These principles and values have been helpful guides in BRAC operations outside Bangladesh.

The ground realities within which BRAC’s approach evolved are widespread poverty, governance failure, the uncertainties and frustrations of post-conflict political environments, deep inequities, weak and missing markets that fail to serve the poor, and unnecessary and preventable deaths. Despite complex differences across countries and cultures, we felt our experiences of working with the poor in these realities and the relatively lower cost of using experienced Bangladeshi staff for training locals at the initial stage of replication gave us an edge over many organizations working in international development.

Before we started work in Africa, we went to Afghanistan in 2002. By 2005, we were inspired by our ability to adapt the BRAC approach to Afghan ground realities, by the positive response from local leaders and people, and by the rapid expansion of operations within a short span of time. We felt that we may have something to offer from our combined experiences in Bangladesh and Afghanistan to further energize and accelerate poverty-alleviation efforts in other countries of the South. It is this spirit of South-South camaraderie that drives and underpins our overseas work.

The African context itself is widely varied. We work in relatively stable and growing economies such as Uganda and Tanzania. We also work in post-conflict countries with their own diverse complexities, such as Southern Sudan, and recently in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Our entry point is the microfinance program, which allows us to build the outreach and the community-level social infrastructure on which we build other activities in healthcare services and agriculture. Making an impact at the national level is one of the core objectives driving our work in Africa.

With the strong track record of our work in Bangladesh and Afghanistan, our willingness and ability to adapt and deliver, and the strong support of many top leaders in African countries as well as of donor agencies, civil-society leaders, and think tanks in developed countries, we feel that we can create effective pro-poor development and an alliance with a southern core.

FORUM: BRAC has participated in partnerships with the private sector. What kids of innovations do you see emerging from the private sector? How can the private sector be more engaged in reaching the poor in ways that benefit both business and the poor?

Abed: BRAC has never shied away from entering into the private-sector domain as a pro-poor actor, to create more secure and rewarding links between the market and the livelihoods of the poor. This has led BRAC to venture into many frontier-market developments that create backward and forward linkages to the enterprises of the poor. BRAC experiments in high-risk ventures have sometimes shown the private sector ways to invest in a new area.

For instance, when BRAC started introducing high-yielding poultry as an enterprise for poor women borrowers, it soon became apparent that a timely supply of quality day-old chicks was a major constraint, which led BRAC to set up hatcheries that are run commercially. Another constraint was high-quality poultry feed; that led BRAC to engage in marketing imported hybrid maize seeds, and setting up feed mills. A whole system of logistics management had to be woven around these enterprises to connect to the poultry business of the poor. This is why at BRAC we like to refer to our commercial enterprises as ‘program-support enterprises.’

Such an approach to building viable private-sector enterprises as a pro-poor actor with the explicit aim of poverty alleviation requires an innovative structure of ownership and governance. The private sector’s partnership with NGOs is driven mainly by two factors: commercial and regulatory compliance. The most important issue that stands in the way of a meaningful and sustainable partnership is the fact that markets do not attach any premium to “socially responsible” behavior by corporations. This results in traditional private-sector actors concentrating mostly on financial parameters and compliance, which is rewarded by the market.

The real potential of a meaningful and sustainable partnership will perhaps emerge from NGOs pioneering sustainable businesses that fulfill a social need and the private sector partnering to bring in core competencies in terms of innovations in products, processes, and financial discipline. This will create efficiencies that will ensure longer-term sustainability. BRAC’s investment in BRAC Bank Limited (BBL), which focuses on creating access to finance for small and medium enterprises, can be seen as an example. BBL started as a closely held company, with BRAC, Shorecap (a U.S.-based investment company), and the IFC as sponsors. Shorecap, which has experience in this sector, and BRAC, which has a strong background in financing microenterprises, leveraged their synergies to the benefit of BBL. Today, BBL is a public limited company that is considered a pioneer and a role model in the field of small- and medium-enterprise financing.

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