Founder of BRAC. He was born in Baniachong village, in what is now Bangladesh, on April 27, 1936, and died of complications from glioblastoma in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Dec 20, 2019, aged 83 years. In the early years after the non-governmental organisation (NGO) BRAC was established in 1972, its Founder and Executive Director Sir Fazle Hasan Abed would travel for days to visit BRAC projects, spending hours speaking to people the agency was trying to assist. “He thought that was his responsibility and the responsibility of the organisation, that it should be working for the poor people and also women and disadvantaged groups”, said Mushtaque Chowdhury, who joined BRAC in 1977 and rose to be its Vice Chairperson before recently retiring. Abed would maintain that focus on the least advantaged, even as BRAC developed into one of the largest NGOs in the world, with programmes spanning public health, economic development, education, agriculture, and disaster relief. There is also a Dhaka-based BRAC University. “He has received many recognitions, but he never thought he should be remembered. He always felt that the work or the need of the people, that’s the legacy that he left for all of us to do”, said Kaosar Afsana, who began working with BRAC in 1992 and is now Professor at BRAC University’s James P Grant School of Public Health. Abed began on a very different career trajectory, studying naval architecture at the University of Glasgow in the UK before transferring to the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in London. He joined Shell Pakistan after returning home in 1968, and soon became head of the finance division. In November, 1970, a cyclone hit East Pakistan, as the country was then known, killing an estimated 300000 people. Abed mounted a humanitarian response, using his house as a headquarters for meetings and for organising supplies. He was still coordinating relief efforts in March, 1971, when West Pakistan’s military launched attacks in East Pakistan, sparking a war that eventually led to Bangladesh’s independence. After the fighting ended in December, 1971, he returned to a country ravaged by the conflict. Abed, who had moved to London during the conflict, sold a flat he owned there and used the money to provide food and build houses for people as they returned. “I didn’t have much of a vision at that time”, he said in a 2014 interview. “It was just a survival question. How does Bangladesh survive in a country which is devastated, ruined by bombing?” Those early relief efforts guided Abed’s founding of BRAC. Lincoln Chen was working at the Cholera Research Laboratory, now the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), when the cyclone struck and joined Abed with his relief work. “You always knew what he was doing was important and that what he was doing had innovative characteristics, but there was nothing that at any one time suggested its ultimate success. It was persistence and dedication”, said Chen, who is now President of the China Medical Board. Abed “redefined the role of NGOs”, Chowdhury said, with his focus on innovation and evidence gathering. “He would constantly monitor and improve the programmes.” Chen pointed to an early BRAC project to teach Bangladeshi women how to mix oral rehydration fluid and administer it to children with diarrhoea. The effort initially met with limited success, until Abed decided to pay the trainers based on whether mothers remembered how to mix the solution. “He had unprecedented ambitions and encouraged innovations”, Chen said. “I think that’s really how he reached a lot of success.” Known for saying “Small is beautiful, but big is necessary”, Abed oversaw BRAC’s growth, introducing and expanding programmes, including one of the world’s earliest microfinance initiatives, which now serves 7·1 million clients. “One of the things that BRAC has done because of his philosophy is show that you have to work at scale if you really want to change the plight of the people”, said Chowdhury, who is also Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York, USA. Abed oversaw BRAC’s geographical expansion, from operating solely in Bangladesh to running projects in four other Asian countries and in six in sub-Saharan Africa. As BRAC grew, Abed recognised that he could not depend on donors for support. He introduced social enterprises, such as milk processing and fish farming, that now cover a substantial proportion of BRAC’s operating costs. “That reflects his vision, that he would think BRAC will eventually need these resources and to be starting these small industries”, said Shams El Arifeen, the Senior Director of the Maternal and Child Health Division at icddr,b. “I cannot imagine what this country would have been without BRAC.” Abed leaves his wife, Sarwat Abed, daughter, Tamara, son, Shameran, and three grandchildren. Andrew Green
Its time to stop blaming 2/3 of humans who are Asian for their consciously open minds and love of education.
Do Atlantic people's old populations still trust and celebrate capability of generating healthy innovative brains? What's clear to anyove visting Washington DC or Brussels is a dismal mismatch exists between the gamechanging future opportunities listed below and how freedom of next generation learning has got muddled by how old male-dominated generations waste money on adevrtising and bossing. Consider the clarity of Stanford's Drew Endy's Strange Competition 1 2:Up to “60% of the physical inputs to the global economy”7 could be made via biotechnology by mid-century, generating ~$30 trillion annually in mostly-new economic activity. 8 Emerging product categories include consumer biologics (e.g., bioluminescent petunias,9 purple tomatoes,10 and hangover probiotics11 ), military hard power (e.g., brewing energetics12 ), mycological manufacturing (e.g., mushroom ‘leather’ 13 ), and biotechnology for technology (e.g., DNA for archival data storage14 ). Accessing future product categories will depend on unlocking biology as a general purpose technology15 (e.g., growing computers16 ), deploying pervasive and embedded biotechnologies within, on, and around us (e.g. smart blood,17 skin vaccines,18 and surveillance mucus19 ), and life-beyond lineage (e.g., biosecurity at birth,20 species de-extinction21 ).  | . notes on drew endy testimony on bio tech 2025 strange competition Natural living systems operate and manufacture materials with atomic precision on a planetary scale, powered by ~130 terawatts of energy self-harvested via photosynthesis Biotechnology enables people to change biology. Domestication and breeding of plants and animals for food, service, and companionship began millennia ago. Gene editing, from recombinant DNA to CRISPR, is used to make medicines and foods, and is itself half-a-century old. Synthetic biology is working to routinize composition of bioengineered systems of ever-greater complexity https://colossal.com/ 20 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34914 19 https://2020.igem.org/Team:Stanford 18 https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/12/skin-bacteria-vaccine.html 17 https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/rbc-factory 16 https://www.src.org/program/grc/semisynbio/semisynbio-consortium-roadmap/ 15 https://www.scsp.ai/2023/04/scsps-platform-panel-releases-national-action-plan-for-u-s-leadership-in-biotechnology/ 14 https://dnastoragealliance.org/ 13 https://www.mycoworks.com/ 12 https://serdp-estcp.mil/focusareas/3b64545d-6761-4084-a198-ad2103880194 11 https://zbiotics.com/ 10 https://www.norfolkhealthyproduce.com/ 9 https://light.bio/ 8 https://web.archive.org/web/20250116082806/https:/www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BUILDIN G-A-VIBRANT-DOMESTIC-BIOMANUFACTURING-ECOSYSTEM.pdf 7 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-econo mies-societies-and-our-lives 6 https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/safeguarding-the-bioeconomy-finding-strategies-for-understanding-ev aluating-and-protecting-the-bioeconomy-while-sustaining-innovation-and-growth 5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2650-9 | AIH- May 2025.Billion Asian womens end poverty networking 2006-1976 is most exciting case of Entrepreneurial Revolution (survey Xmas 1976 Economist by dad Norman Macrae & Romano Prodi). In 2007, dad sampled 2000 copies of Dr Yunus Social Business Book: and I started 15 trips to Bangladesh to 2018- many with apprentice journalists. This is a log of what we found - deepened after dad's death in 2010 by 2 kind remembrance parties hoist by Japan Embassy in Dhaka with those in middle of digital support of what happened next. We witnessed a lot of conflicts - i can try and answer question chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk or see AI20s updates at http://povertymuseums.blogspot.com. I live in DC region but see myself as a Diaspoira Scot. Much of dad's libraries we transfreered with Dr Yunus to Glasgow University and enditirs og journals of social business, new economics and innovators of Grameen's virtual free nursing school. Bangladesh offers best intelligence we have seen for sdgs 5 through 1 up to 2008, Search eg 4 1 oldest edu 4.6 newest edu ; .620th century intelligence - ending poverty of half world without electricity -although Keynes 1936 (last chapter General Theiory: Money, Interest, Employment) asked Economists to take hippocratic oath as the profession that ended extreme poverty, most economists have done the opposite. What's not understandable is how educators failed to catalogue the lessons of the handful who bottom-up empowered villages to collaboratively end poverty. There are mainly 2 inteligences to understand- Borlaug on food science -arguable the forst Biointeligence rising ar1950 on; fazle abed on everything that raised life expectancy in tropical village (zero-electricity) asia from low 40s to 60s (about 7 below norm of living with electricity and telecomes). Between 1972 and late 1990s, Abed's lessons catalogued in this mooc had largely built the nation of Bangladesh and been replicated with help of Unicef's James Grant acroo most tropical asian areas. What's exciting is the valley's mr ad mrs steve jobs invted Fazle Abed to share inteligences 2001 at his 65th birthday party. The Jobs and frineds promised to integrate abed's inteligence into neighborhod university stanfrd which in any event wanted Jobs next great leap the iphone. The Valley told abed to start a university so that women graduates from poor and rich nations could blend inteligence as Abed's bottom of the pyramid vilage began their journey of leapfrog modles now that grid infrastructures were ni longer needed for sdiar and mobile. Abed could also help redesign the millennium goals which were being greenwashed into a shared worldwide system coding frame by 2016. There at Abed's 80th birtday party , the easy bit was checking this mooc was uptodate. The hard bit - what did Abed mean by his wish to headhunt a Taiwanese American to head the university's 3rd decade starting 2020? |
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