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

Friday, December 31, 2010

*4 education

http://www.brac.net/sites/default/files/BRAC_education_info_English.pdf

BRAC’s Evolution - part 4 education follows below

 // ref *3 health  2 food/land security  1 finance  5 community partner collabs

1972 Fazle Hasan Abed establishes BRAC 

1973 Activities transform from relief and rehabilitation to long term community development, including adult literacy interventions 

1985 BRAC’s Non-Formal Primary Education Programme (NFPE) is started 

1993 Adolescent Reading Centres are opened 

1994 The Non-Formal Primary Education programme is replicated in Africa 

1995 The Continuing Education programme is started

 1997 BRAC Pre-Primary Schools commence operation 

1999 The Adolescent Peer Organised Network (APON) course is created

 2001 BRAC University is established. 

 The Post-Primary Basic Education (PBEn) programme is set up 

2002 BRAC commences development work in Afghanistan 

2003 The Continuing Education and Post Primary Basic Education programmes are integrated into a single programme called the Post Primary Basic and Continuing Education (PACE) programme 

2004 BRAC University establishes the James P. Grant School of Public Health and the Institute of Educational Development 

2006 BRAC’s development programmes in Africa commence 

2008 BRAC’s education programme initiates capacity building of government and registered non-government primary schools

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Sir Fazle Hasan Abed’s immense contribution to education is through the pioneering work of BRAC, a development organisation he founded and led to his death in 2019. When Abed established BRAC in early 1972 as a relief and rehabilitation project in a remote village in Bangladesh, immediately following the country’s war of liberation, the literacy rate was below 20%.

Despite the population more than doubling since then, the country has made remarkable progress in providing access to education. Almost all children now enroll in the first year of primary school. Uniquely among poor countries, the gender gap in enrollment in primary and secondary education has also been eliminated. Alongside government and private sector efforts, BRAC’s groundbreaking education programme, a brainchild of Abed, is a key factor in these achievements.

 From the beginning of his foray into development work, Abed viewed education as a crucial catalyst for change. In his youth, he was influenced by the teachings of his maternal grandfather, an education minister in the government of Bengal. Later he was inspired by the ideas of the likes of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Soon after starting BRAC’s relief and rehabilitation activities, Abed realized the need for sustainable development efforts. When BRAC shifted its focus to long term community development activities in 1972, education naturally became a key area of work. Abed’s very first development plan for BRAC aimed to make literate the entire adult population of the 1.1 meta-village in which it was then working and get all primary school dropouts back into school.

But Abed understood that education was about more than just schools and books. He ensured that functional education was an underlying fundamental in BRAC’s organizing principles. Initially, this encompassed awareness building and literacy and numeracy skills for adults. Abed had BRAC develop its own learning materials in the form of posters, flip charts etc. By the end of the 1970’s, BRAC had developed a comprehensive educational system, including a community development and literacy and numeracy curricula, training, research and publishing. But functional education for adults would not ensure sustainable progress for such a large population. For that, Abed believed there was a need to ensure primary level literacy for all children. In 1974, BRAC started engaging with the primary education sector through a monthly magazine for children which was sent to all 45,000 public schools in the country. But poverty, distance, corruption and poor quality of education were keeping a large majority of children from the public school system.

So, in 1985, Abed initiated a pilot non-formal primary education programme. He wanted to demonstrate that education could be made relevant, cost-effective and of a high quality and that retention rates could be improved and gender imbalance could be rectified. In conducting this experiment, Abed sought help from expert educators at local universities. What emerged was a revolutionary model in primary education – a one-room school where a teacher who is a member of the local community takes a class of 33 children through the entire 5-year primary curriculum in four years. The school’s customized curriculum and books were designed using state-of-the-art teaching-learning methods and strong involvement of both parents. 

Abed had always believed that women, though worst affected by poverty, could play a crucial role as agents of change. He understood that educating girls would not only empower them and help improve their status in their families and community, but also ensure their future family’s wellbeing. Educated women would make better decisions regarding family planning etc. and subsequently their children’s health and education. So, as with all BRAC initiatives, gender became an essential ingredient for BRAC’s education programme from the very beginning. To offset the existing gender imbalance in Bangladesh’s education system, Abed set a target of 70% for the enrolment of girls and encouraged the recruitment of mostly female teachers. His extensive reading helped Abed keep up with the latest thinking on development issues. He reached out to educators in the Netherlands, New Zealand and England to help develop interactive learning material for BRAC schools.

 Abed is a big believer in scale. “Small is beautiful,”he is known to say, “but in bangladesh big is necessary”. So when the pilot schools, whose terms ended in 1987, proved to be a success, Abed had his team scale up and in just five short years, BRAC recovered almost 20,000 children who had been fallen out of the formal system. By the mid 90’s, BRAC had 19,000 schools and graduated over 500,000 children in Bangladesh and its school model was being replicated in Africa. 

A large majority of BRAC graduates in Bangladesh were going into the public system for higher education. But some, mostly girls, were not continuing their education due to social pressures such as marriage. For these adolescents, Abed set up a‘continuing education’ programme, which encompassed community libraries and adolescent reading centres where these students could stay in touch with books and learning materials. Eventually, these centres became a platform for further functional education and empowerment of adolescent girls. 

Abed understood the need for harnessing the power of the youth – not only those from disadvantaged families, but also the elite. Under his guidance, BRAC set up a university with the mission to build capacity on a national level by creating “functional elites”. In addition to providing a comprehensive liberal education, BRAC University has established several institutes for post-graduate research and training to strengthen human capacity in several key areas critical to national development.

 It was always Abed’s intention that BRAC schools would be a temporary solution to the issue of access to education. He aimed for a deeper engagement with the formal education system. Towards this, one initiative he undertook was the development in 1997 of a network of pre-primary schools to give young children from illiterate households a head start before they entered into the formal primary system. Before this, pre-primary education was a concept reserved for the elite in Bangladesh. It is now being adopted into the national education system. 

The government has since actively involved BRAC in providing educational development services. In 1997, BRAC partnered with the government to develop the teaching and management capacities of public secondary school teachers and administrators. 

In 1999, BRAC took over dysfunctional community primary schools to make them operational. In 2002, intent on spreading the learning of BRAC’s post-war rehabilitation experience in Bangladesh, 

Abed established BRAC’s first international operations in Afghanistan. Education was a key sector there as well, especially for girls. Of the over 70,000 students currently attending BRAC schools in Afghanistan, 85% are girls. Abed has institutionalized cros-cutting concepts of inclusiveness and innovation at BRAC. 

In the education sector, the development of bi-lingual schools and materials for ethnic minority groups, inclusion of special needs children in BRAC schools, training of teachers and communities on special needs issues and equipping schools and students with assistive devices are testaments to this. Constant innovation is a cornerstone of BRAC’s education programme, which has introduced concepts such as computer-aided learning, Multi Strategy Language Teaching, mentoring etc. into both its own operations as well as partner systems. 

No other organisation can match the range, quality, scale and effectiveness of BRAC’s education programme. Present in half of the 10 countries across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in which BRAC currently operates, it is the largest secular, non-formal education system in the world. More than 35,000 BRAC schools worldwide are providing primary education to more than 1 million students (over 65% girls). Nearly 5 million children (over 65% girls) have already graduated from BRAC’s primary schools and over 95% of them have gone on to formal schooling at the secondary level. It is also one of the most effective - in Bangladesh’s state-conducted primary completion examination in 2010, 99 percent of the BRAC students passed, a rate at least 15% higher than the national average. But what really differentiates BRAC’s education programme from all others is its costeffectiveness. In Bangladesh, the per-child cost for BRAC’s four-year primary education is under USD 30! 

And BRAC’s interventions are not limited to just primary schooling – between early childhood to young-adulthood, almost 10 million people have to date directly benefited from a variety of education interventions run by BRAC. It is the foresight and guidance of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed which has made these achievements possible. He has been the visionary behind most of BRAC’s groundbreaking interventions in education, quietly guiding his team of dedicated development practitioners towards constant reinvention. Of all his successes in ensuring education for all, Abed can be most proud that in the hearts of millions of disadvantaged children around the world he has inculcated a love of learning which they will carry with them for the rest of their lives