Studyng Fazle Abed (BRAC) is fascinating: world's best educator; world's best at designining businesses that poorest women could scale across communities
this generalises to being networking's 3rd force from efficient government and efficient corporates (of the sort that suck out community value every quarter) to be the model traingularising gaols the UN calls sustainability
In many ways if brac went into a sector where traditional businesses compete it needed to be better at lest in delecering the baics of efficient effective expandavle - the 3 e's abed looked for
We house intelligence neeed to deeply linkin sustainability at caholicuni.com as Fazle Abed said the value system that inspired him was Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the oppressed -ie the Franciscan system at its purest
There are 3 interesting stoeies about St Francis way which I would leave researchers to verify or deny
Most recently it is said that when north americans proved landinnf on the moon was possible, latin america hosted a near contiennt wide debate. The issue being if soon anyhting ay be possible what are our cultural values (we know they were inherited from being settled by portufuese abds spabish) but catholicism has varaints; according to this story it was the franciscan way that the majority of latin americans hoped the late 20th C would expand as tech nade nothing impossible
Iy is said that in st francis time- arabs and catholics were in conflict with each other until st francis explained any maen wjo network with me ate to love diversity of mother nature- to help design solutions matching local diversity; and in parallel female networks the clares are to specialise in serving maternal and infant health.
A thord paradox is the bat that connects the san francisco region to silicon valley extends betwene 2 once spanish towns - that of Francis and of Clare.
Ok these re just stories. I am interested in some worldwide questions:
are there any other organsdiation dessigned like brac - arguably india's tata is - my understanding is it competes in many ciropate markets but reinvests its profits in a trsut for the development of all Indian people. Again verification is needed.
There aare several rules of thumb of brac
1 Fazle Abed never wanted to be mainly reliant on charity; he did feel that about 25% aid was the optimal mix because he wanted to compete in solutions the world needed; if you study where brac got the most aid it was in solutions eg oral rehydration that needed open sourcing wherever rural kids died of sairrhea - one in 3 infants doing so when bangladesh ws founded in 1971 as poorest and 8th most populous nation on earth;
sometimes abed would develop a solution which he wanted government to take over with a taxation model; again this fiited aid as an initial source as it wasnt going to be an intergenrational positive cash flow contributor to brac
some people mistkenly believe abed's goal at birt if nation was measurable in say raiaising poorest earnings from say a dolar a day to 2 dolars a day- it wasnt; it ws raising life expectancy from low 40s to mid 60s. When life expectancy is in low 40s many sad things happen; in male dominated socieries women are expected to be baby factories birthing say 10 children so that at least 2 boys survive to grow up as men; another reason for not defining end poverty in monetary terms is that vilage women swapped many solutions without monetary exchnage; at the very poorest level counting up paper money isnt helpful; indeed handling of very small amounts of cashflow is also impossible to top down bank for.
It turns out that abed had to reinvent the oragsnaiation twice abd as ai links in tyhe world I desperately wish he was here for a third innovation
between 1972 and the late 1990s - rural meant no access to electricity; each vilage was in some wys a separate market; however what happened in mid 1990s was solar and mobile both brough extrordinary opportunities for vilage grwth and indeed trabfer of rural peo[les to city and to foreign lands where oftern a nation's most healthy boy was expected to remit wages back to the family; even today about one third of foreign exchnaged owned is remittances alongside about a third from food which bangladesh is ma=iracilusly a net expoerted - and most of the other thrd comes from the garment industry.. Whether Bangladesh can expect to continue to be in worlds top 3 as garment manufacturer seems an urgent question to include in data soveresignty mapping of bangadesh; if you look at the geography bangaldesh is still boxed in with no access to superport or world calss rail service due to the diastrous nation og myanmar (which literally spills over a million poorest refugees into bangladesh) and India which hasnt yet resolved conflicts with muslim,s alllbeint msot troubles of this sort coming from the west. It is particulrly sad if you follow coastline north of mtanmar to note much of asia's rising trade that bangladesh's part of bay of bengal is curt off from since the english partitioned sunbcominnet of india int 3 at ime of independence. Historically Calutta was all og benagl people port; after aprtition it was owned by india
We can develop acronym sHE*Lf)F around un's 5 deepest goals she-too health educationion land-finance food
trabforamtion is clealy needed Y-WE (vauing youth water and energy)
to some extent goals 1 to 8 can be resolved if ai scales apps communities need (layer 5 ai as jensen hunang maps it) though other UN gials such as peace climate ocean (free see trade) land trade clearly require a world where human slove each other more than the 120 years of wars since einstein oublished e=mcsquared
when demis hassabis says he hopes to agent einstein brain power wherever needed through AI by 2030, its time to ask chats what joys of human intelgence netwirking they would prioriise if ai does indeed have einstein brain power and access to deep data mapping aligned to natures sciences
see part of our survey at www.economistdiary.com/2026/05 - and help look at un sdgoals as possible codes - we have arranged year 2001 to 2016 of this blog to relate to associated un chalenges but need lot more help cataloguing effective efficuent and expandable apps communities and youth need to tranform world around if intelligence not ignorance is to bless the coming decade
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