Proposed talk UN Educational Transformation Summit Sept 2022
5 Dimensional Education Transformation
Fazle Abed & Village Women Empowered Bangladesh
Over 50 years Fazle Abed built employees of Brac to be comprised of over 100000 village livelihood trainers . He gravitated village womens networking and servant ;leadership around the cultural values of Paulo Freire
Brac networked non-linear education. Livelihood skills' interventions for all ages offers a different overall system for place development than national government focused on examination education as a linear system that a child enters until she/he is failed as not having the capacity for higher education,. It can be useful to study the evolution of brac round these 5 dimensions and their match to the 5 deepest sustainability goals every community benefits from developing people around. An unique innovation of Abed's life's work on poverty alleviation and agency of poorest women was piloting solutions for metavillages of 100000 person livelihoods. From 1962 my father , Norman Macrae, had reported one model of Asia Rising as Rural Keynesianism (purpose: full rural employment as a natural and intergenerational development responsibility of national leadership)
Metavillage as a development lab enabled Abed to test scaling in ways that few development practitioners have integrated. This was pivotal during Bangladesh's first 25 years (1971-1996) where rural was defined as zero access to electricity grids or telecommunications. It is arguable that today's world is fortunate that abed made his biggest mistake at the start of BRA-C. He used his life saving to rebuild homes for 100000 people only to find village mothers were starving - hence the urgency of the educational challenge and why his entrepreneurial innovation of microfranchising was key to market (value chain) solutions he evolved.
Goal 2 ending hunger involved village mothers' microfranchise education -the action learning they needed to replicate microfranchises of local production of rice, veggies, poultry, dairy, other agricultural value chains both core to last mile food security and sustaining rural-urban trade including eg climate adaptation (eg social forestry) and design skills (sericulture)
Goal 3 village mother microfranchises of last mile health
Goal 4 Childrens education primary, secondary apprenticeships, university, pre-school
Gola 1 Financial education both of village mothers and in transforming worldwide aid. It is worth nothing that abed anticipated which markets could be designed round social businesses and which markets microfranchises were being piloted for government to subsequently take on (Goal 1)
Massive collaboration platforms. When I asked Abed if reporting could be laid out as a MOOC - he said he valued massive open online but C in his mindset stands for Collaboration. brac's longest running partners also needed to unlearn and action learn which opportunities built women to be as productive in nation building as men. (Goal 5)
Genesis of This Reporting
Japan's ambassador to Dhaka arranged 2 brainstorming dinners chaired by abed in remembrance of my father who had argued in the economist since 1962 that Asian Rising models integrated educational transgfo0rmation. 16 visits to bangladesh during Abed's last decade help clarified how abed effectively practised entrepreneurial revolution. Father had been briefed by von neumann 1951 that humans were compounding the post-industrial revolution of 100 times more tech & communications per decade.
Until his parting, December 2019. Abed was mapping back from future of 100 times more tech collaborations with more deep love of humanity than anyone father or I have met in case studying fusion of human and artificial Intel including our 1984 fieldbook on 2025 deadlines for going beyond the Orwellian Big Brother endgame (2025report.com). Education transformation is urgent if it is to be integral to leaping forward from crises such as covid, climate and the intent of Collaboration Europe which my gather journalised at Messina 1955. It may also be urgently time to mediate whether sustainability is to be the purpose of the tech revolutions of neumann and his transatlantic mathematical peers (eg Einstein , Turing) . Integrated with education , local and global tech transformation may be 2020s last chance to unite nations and youth as first sustainability generation. Abed was insistent that artistic celebrations offered key clues to the 2020s he valued women's emotional intelligence as co-producing from metavillage to metaverse!
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From my father Norman Macrae's death in 2010 I was briefed by Abed to work with his son Shameran and Vice Chancellor Vincent Chang. I am happy if any combination of us present this. My operational understanding is limited compared with the extraordinary responsibility for continuing what Abed navigated as to be the ngo world's largest partnership economy. I work as a statistician and mapmaking reporter of the system designs my father worked on over 50 years of media facilitation at The Economist and as biographer of Von Neumann, and as Scottish explorers of the relevance of Adam Smith morality to purposes of markets and human advancement.