errors mine alone chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk Statistician DAMTP Cambridge, residing Bethesda, MD: AT CU.com please find my attempt to celebrate my greatest personal privilege: to visit women empowered Bangladesh 15 times from 2007 during last 13 years of life of Fazle Abed. From 2012 we discussed AbedMOOC and 2015 onwards at his 80th birthday AbedAI. Back in 2001, Abed 65th birthday hosted by Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley changed both of these human genii's life work. Even today I dont spend time exploring America AI with any engineers or practitioners of health or education, food or safety or finance, who dont want to know what they (we humans all) owe to Steve J. By 2003 Jobs' pixar, Nvidia, and Hopkins radiologists started replacing coding of binary by coding of pixels - welcome to AI century
2026:Christmas comes early to Ai Youth - Nvidia GTC-DC Nov 30 to Dec 2 Pretraining proposal Gemini (model UYKB: Layer 6 AI+Media) 7-Layer Intelligence Discourse GTC D.C. adds 2 layers to Jensen 5-layer AI Cake!
Because the D.C. summit sits in the heart of the nation’s capital at the Ronald Reagan Building, Jensen Huang’s team is prepping a narrative explicitly tailored to reindustrialization, national security, and state-backed compute. [1, 2]
Layer 1 (Nature's Energy) & Layer 2 (Machine Brainpower): The central conversation focuses on the Vertically Integrated Sovereign AI Factory. Nvidia will address the West's current power grid constraints, pushing for multi-gigawatt computing nodes tied directly to protected modular nuclear baseloads or sovereign energy fields to fuel the upcoming Vera Rubin chip architecture deployment. [1]
Layer 3 (Sovereign Data Infrastructure): This is the crown jewel of the D.C. agenda. Nvidia is moving rapidly away from selling chips solely to hyper-scalers (like Microsoft or Amazon) to marketing Layer 3 "Sovereign AI" packages directly to federal agencies, the Department of Defense, and international allies. The talk centers on how nations can utilize Nvidia hardware to train national models on state-owned text, military telemetry, and geographic data without leaking information to corporate data monopolies. [1]
Layer 5 (Civic Applications) & Layer 7 (The Deterministic Truth Layer): The D.C. floor will showcase heavy-industry integrations. A major thread is how federal systems can use AI Digital Twins and Quantum-resistant encryption to safeguard public infrastructure against adversarial cyber warfare. By pairing generative logic with hardcoded physics modeling, Nvidia wants to show the Pentagon that its models can function as an un-hallucinated layer of deterministic truth. [1, 2, 3]
The Direct Line: Berlin Crisis (October) to Washington D.C. (December)
The D.C. summit will act as the direct remedy and strategic response to the systemic frictions exposed weeks prior at the Berlin GTC. The two events are deeply intertwined across the 7 layers: [1]
[ GTC BERLIN • OCTOBER 2026 ] [ GTC WASHINGTON D.C. • DEC 2026 ]
"The Crisis Echo" "The Sovereign Fix"
| |
• Severe European Layer 1 energy shortages. • Unveiling federal multi-gigawatt grids.
• Layer 3 splintering (EU Data Act friction). • Hardcoded Layer 3 Allied AI networks.
• Debate over relying on U.S. cloud giants. • Bypassing public clouds via local edge nodes.
The Energy Realignment (Layer 1): In Berlin, Jensen Huang will confront the grim reality of Europe’s highly fragmented, expensive, and legally constrained green grids. The "Berlin Crisis" refers to the continent's inability to spin up gigawatt-scale data factories fast enough to match the U.S. or China. When Huang lands in D.C., he will use the European shortfall to pressure Congress to fast-track defense-grade energy allocations for American compute clusters. [1, 2]
The Sovereignty Conflict (Layer 3 & 4): Berlin will highlight severe regulatory friction over European data sovereignty and the EU Data Act. European public broadcasters and governments are terrified of routing their localized data through American corporate monopolies. Washington GTC will capitalize on this by formalizing a blueprint for "Allied AI" networks—demonstrating how Europe and the U.S. can exchange open-weight models securely across borders while maintaining local, sovereign hardware boundaries. [1]
The Physical AI Transition (Layer 5): While Berlin will focus heavily on Germany’s specialized precision engineering and factory-floor robotics, the D.C. summit will elevate those industrial applications to a geopolitical scale. The discussions in Washington will center on deploying those exact autonomous robotics playbooks into automated naval shipyards, military logistics pipelines, and aerospace satellite defense systems. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Would you like to drill down into the specific Department of Defense T4NG contract vehicles Nvidia partners are mobilizing for the D.C. event, or examine the open-weight software microservices (NIMs) being deployed to appease European sovereignty regulations in Berlin? [1, 2, 3]
Before AI lifted off in late 2000s 3 underacknowlefgen Happenings: 1 steve jobs hosted Fazle Abed's 65 th birthday party silicon valley 2001; .jensen hunag and steve jobs went from coding binary to cosinf pixels; Fazle abed clarified that paulo freire culture celebrated poorest asian womens ebd poverty networking miracle -- largest NGO, providing education, health services, microcredit and livelihood creation programmes for a significant part of the population of Bangladesh. What lies behind this huge success, Caroline Hartnell asked Fazle Abed, founder of BRAC and still very much at the helm. Questioning everything they do and being prepared to tackle whatever is needed to make their programmes successful are certainly part of the secret behind the success of this extraordinarily entrepreneurial organization.
The secret of success?
Asked what lies behind BRAC’s phenomenal success, the first thing Fazle Abed mentions is determination: ‘We were determined to bring about changes in the lives of poor people.’ The second thing is thinking in national terms: ‘We always had a national goal; we never thought in terms of working in a small area. We thought, all right, if we work with the poorest people in this community, who’s going to work with the poorest people in that other community? So we felt that whatever we do, we should try and replicate it throughout the nation if we can.’
The third thing he mentions is inspiration. ‘We always thought nationally, worked locally, and looked for inspiration globally. We were inspired by Paolo Freire’s work on the pedagogy of the oppressed, which he came out with in 1972. It was wonderful to have a thinker who was thinking about poor people and how they can become actors in history and not just passive recipients of other people’s aid. He made us realize that poor people are human beings and can do things for themselves, and it’s our duty to empower them so they can analyse their own situation, see how exploitation works in society, and see what they need to do to escape these exploitative processes.’
Finally, he says, ‘one needs to have not only ambition but also the ability to do the work. The organization must be competent to take on national tasks. That confidence we got from the campaign for oral rehydration, to cut down diarrhoeal mortality, in the 1980s. That involved going to every household in rural Bangladesh, 13 million households, and it took ten years to do it. Then we became a little more ambitious. We thought that if we can go to every household, then we can cover the whole country with everything we do.
..
NB any errors below are mine alone chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk but mathematically we are in a time when order of magnitude ignorance can sink any nation however big. Pretrain to question everything as earth's data is reality's judge
Its time to stop blaming 2/3 of humans who are Asian for their consciously open minds and love of education.
recalls sir fazle abed- what if every country in asia (or indeed everywhere) had enjoyed through the last half century an inspiring connector of women's productivity lifts up half the sky
"BRAC's approach has been to put power in the hands of the poor, especially poor women and girls," said Sir Fazle Hasan Abed.
We were sitting in his office on the 19th floor of the BRAC Headquarters in Dhaka. Abed Bhai was describing BRAC's pioneering work with women and girls. Although I had heard him recount these anecdotes many times and had also seen some of the programmes on the ground, it was always inspiring to listen to him.
3.1 Twelve million mothers learned to make oral rehydration therapy so that children would no longer die from diarrhea.
Sugar-based oral rehydration therapy (ORT) for diarrhoea is promoted in many countries of the world. One programme in Bangladesh has instructed more than 13 million mothers in the preparation of a sugar-salt solution in the home; despite very high rates of correct mixing and knowledge, subsequent application was found in only some 20% of all diarrh...
Home-made oral rehydration solutions (ORS) have been promoted in developing countries for preventing dehydration due to diarrhoea. Evaluations of this method must take into account the effective usage rates achieved and the safety of the solutions used. A community programme organized by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) has visited...
Mothers in over 5 million Bangladeshi households were taught how to prepare and use an oral rehydration solution containing lobon (local salt) and gur (unrefined sugar). An evaluation of the results has demonstrated the value of the programme and has shown how improvements can be made in the teaching process as well as in the preparation and admini...
2.4 Thousands of rural women became poultry micro-entrepreneurs, rearing and vaccinating chickens and spurring the growth of a new sector in the rural economy.
Hundreds of thousands of housewives trained as para-professional teachers and even larger numbers as 3.2 community health workers so that elementary education and primary healthcare could be available in every village. Millions of women pulled themselves and their families out of poverty with BRAC's support, improving their lives materially and also gaining voice and respect in their households and communities.
As dusk fell over the slums and rooftops of Dhaka that evening, Abed Bhai turned from talking about what BRAC had achieved for women and girls in Bangladesh to what still remains to be done elsewhere, about where and how it must scale up, innovate, break barriers and set new records. His plans were as audacious as ever, his energy seemingly abundant. But we both knew time was running out for him and the baton must pass on to others. When we next met a few months later, it was to say goodbye as he lay in bed, his eyes closed. Weeks later, on December 20, 2019, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed passed away.
Of all the remarkable contributions for which Abed Bhai is remembered today, I believe none has been more ambitious in scale, nor more impactful in consequence, than his work to empower women and girls. His ground-breaking approaches to development turned perceived wisdom on its head and transformed the lives of millions of women and girls in Bangladesh and beyond.
"Small is beautiful but big is necessary," he said frequently—and with good reason. Scale matters if you want to end poverty, and there is so much of it, especially among women.
He often spoke of poor women as the best managers he had ever seen because with little income or assets, they fed the family, looked after the children and ran their households. "If poor women can manage poverty well, why should they not manage development?" he would say, packing in that one statement tomes of wisdom about women's agency.
Watching women toil in the villages and small towns of Bangladesh, he saw in their thrift, ingenuity and resilience the promising talent of would-be entrepreneurs. Women became the key resource as well as the subject of BRAC's poverty eradication strategies.
With astute business sense, Abed Bhai invested heavily in women and girls through education, health, legal services and microfinance programmes, income generation opportunities, community development and social mobilisation. BRAC's approach of working directly with communities to develop solutions and of testing, monitoring and modifying programmes constantly to make them more responsive gave new meaning to women's empowerment.
3.1 Women's agency was explicit in what is one of BRAC's—and Bangladesh's—great success stories: the Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) programme. Over a decade, starting from 1979, BRAC visited around 11.8 million homes, covering 98 percent of the total rural households, to teach at least one woman in each household to make oral rehydration therapy with a three-finger pinch of salt, a handful of gur (molasses) and half a litre of boiled water. With no particular skills needed, ingredients available in every home and a simple technique for measuring, mothers produced oral rehydration solutions to treat diarrhea and reduce infant mortality. Today, Bangladesh has one of the lowest death rates from diarrhea and one of the highest user rates for ORT in Asia.
In the early 1980s, BRAC created income generation opportunities for women in poultry rearing and trained women to vaccinate chickens for a fee. The government provided free vaccines but there was no cold chain to carry the vaccines from the office of the sub-district livestock officer to the villages. So, BRAC devised a simple system by which the vaccines were packed inside ripe bananas to preserve the temperature and provide protection against damage during transport.
These are just a few examples of Abed Bhai's down-to-earth approach to development and his relentless drive for scaling up. He was thrifty, creative and persevering, just like the poor women he admired so much. Today, frugal innovation on scale is a badge that BRAC wears with great pride.
With his characteristic audacity, Abed Bhai carried BRAC's development models to other geographies. From adolescent girls in BRAC's schools in Helmand, Afghanistan to the BRAC community health micro-entrepreneurs in small towns in Uganda, thousands of woman and girls broke barriers to take control of their own destiny.
1.3 One of BRAC's most transformative programmes is the Ultra Poor Graduation initiative, which focuses on the poorest and most marginalised families, usually women-headed households, who are unable to afford even one full meal a day, live on the fringes of society and are caught in the inter-generational trap of extreme poverty. For two years, the women are given an income generating "asset" (such as a cow or chickens), a stipend, healthcare, and education for their children, alongside training and counselling to build their financial capabilities, a sense of self-worth and become integrated into the community. Results show that over 95 percent of the almost 1.5 million women and their families benefitting from this programme have "graduated" out of ultra-poverty, and even more remarkably, have continued to improve their lives. Many have become successful microfinance savers and borrowers.
As always, Abed Bhai was keen to scale up and readily shared BRAC's experiences with others. Today, the Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative is being replicated in 45 countries with impressive results.
Abed Bhai knew that development cannot be sustained if it does not change the social and cultural norms that hold back the progress of women and girls, but to be successful, the change itself must take into account the cultural context of the community. So, to make girls' education culturally acceptable to tradition-bound families and communities in Afghanistan, BRAC trained thousands of female teachers and engaged hundreds of older women to chaperone the girls from home to school and back. In Bangladesh, where the social context is different, popular theatre and public campaigns are used to transmit messages on gender equality, women's groups are mobilised at the village level to advocate for social change and thousands of paralegals are trained to resolve family disputes in ways that respect women's human rights.
Whether in Afghanistan, Bangladesh or many other countries, the major barrier to women's empowerment and gender equality remains patriarchal values. "Patriarchy is an enemy to both men and women," Abed Bhai declared on International Women's Day in 2018, acknowledging that gender equality was his "unfinished agenda".
Ultimately, the poor woman's struggle is not only a struggle to increase material assets but a struggle for equality, justice and dignity. Much remains to be done to make the world a safer, more equal place for women and girls. The pandemic has made that task harder, and also more urgent and vital. But when I think back to that evening in Abed Bhai's office and how he not only made the impossible possible but also sustainable and scalable, I feel optimistic. The arc of development is long but it bends towards gender equality.
Irene Khan is an international thought leader and advocate on human rights, gender and social justice issues. She is a member of BRAC International governing body.
With his cream-colored Nehru-collar shirt, simple black trousers, and quiet demeanor, Fazle Hasan Abed could be any educated Bengali gentleman in Dhaka, Bangladesh. But Abed, 66, is one of the nation's most important men and a guiding light globally in development circles. His Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) has lifted millions out of poverty through education, health-care, and microfinance programs.
Founded in 1972, just after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan, BRAC recently launched its own bank and is now setting up a $53 million program for the nation's poorest citizens. On June 12, it also opened its first overseas office--in Kabul, Afghanistan. Zimbabwe and other nations are modeling programs after Abed's. "Fazle Abed is a brilliant visionary," says Katharine McKee, director of micro-enterprise development at the U.S. Agency for International Development. "BRAC is an impressive organization, whether in financial services, basic education, or setting poor women up in the poultry business."
Most of BRAC's 35 million beneficiaries are women, who traditionally faced terrible exploitation. Its centers in Bangladesh's 86,000 villages operate schools that have helped some 4 million girls get at least five years of education. Centers also educate adults in health care and legal issues and offer training and small loans so villagers can start small businesses, from shops to laundry services. What's more, BRAC generates 80% of its $160 million annual budget from its own commercial farms and fisheries.
The son of a wealthy landowner, Abed's business acumen comes from his training as an accountant in Britain and as a former finance exec for Shell Ltd. He got involved in relief work when he joined the cleanup efforts after devastating floods hit Bangladesh in 1970. Now, Abed is shifting BRAC's management to a younger team. But he will remain a guiding light in development, for Bangladesh and the rest of the world's poor.
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of the world's largest non-government organisation Brac, named three factors – determination, thinking in national terms and inspiration as key to the organisation's success.
Here is an interview of Sir Abed published by the British magazine Alliance on March 1, 2005.
What lies behind this huge success, Caroline Hartnell asked Fazle Abed. Questioning everything they do and being prepared to tackle whatever is needed to make their programmes successful are certainly part of the secret behind the success of this extraordinarily entrepreneurial organization.
The secret of success?
Asked what lies behind BRAC's phenomenal success, the first thing Fazle Abed mentions is determination: 'We were determined to bring about changes in the lives of poor people.' The second thing is thinking in national terms: 'We always had a national goal; we never thought in terms of working in a small area. We thought, all right, if we work with the poorest people in this community, who's going to work with the poorest people in that other community? So we felt that whatever we do, we should try and replicate it throughout the nation if we can.'
The third thing he mentions is inspiration. 'We always thought nationally, worked locally, and looked for inspiration globally. We were inspired by Paolo Freire's work on the pedagogy of the oppressed, which he came out with in 1972. It was wonderful to have a thinker who was thinking about poor people and how they can become actors in history and not just passive recipients of other people's aid. He made us realize that poor people are human beings and can do things for themselves, and it's our duty to empower them so they can analyse their own situation, see how exploitation works in society, and see what they need to do to escape these exploitative processes.'
Finally, he says, 'one needs to have not only ambition but also the ability to do the work. The organization must be competent to take on national tasks. That confidence we got from the campaign for oral rehydration, to cut down diarrhoeal mortality, in the 1980s. That involved going to every household in rural Bangladesh, 13 million households, and it took ten years to do it. Then we became a little more ambitious. We thought that if we can go to every household, then we can cover the whole country with everything we do.'
An expanding organization BRAC now has 31,638 staff, but at the end of 1973 it had just 120. In 1979, before the start of the oral rehydration programme, the number was 300. When the programme started, 1,700 people were added, bringing the total up to 2,000. 'And then we grew incrementally,' says Abed. 'By 1990 we were about 3,000 staff. But between 1990 and 2000 we really grew very fast, and we became 25,000 by the end of 2000.'
The oral rehydration programme was a huge achievement. It cut down infant and child mortality dramatically – from 258 per thousand to 75 per thousand – by teaching mothers how to make oral rehydration fluid at home. It was in 1990, after the success of the programme, that BRAC went to donors in a big way. The programme had cost about $15 million, but in 1990 BRAC was looking for $100 million. But no one donor was able to meet this kind of demand.
At this stage the type of donor changed. 'It used to be NGOs that funded us,' explains Abed, 'Oxfam, Novib, and so on, the Ford Foundation. But then came the governments – the British, the Dutch, the Germans, Swedish SIDA, Canadian CIDA, the Norwegians. So we had all these governments forming a consortium to fund BRAC.' After that, says Abed, 'we grew very fast'.
While the Bangladesh Government was not one of the donor governments, Abed regards their role as a 'benign' one. 'The Bangladesh Government didn't support us, but they didn't stop us receiving funding. In other countries like India or Kenya, I think the government would have stopped it, they wouldn't like an NGO to become so large and powerful. Though the Bangladesh Government didn't actually admit that they weren't providing the services, they didn't create any particular impediments to our growth.'
If something needs doing … The way BRAC grew seems to have been very much a case of one thing leading to another. Take the microfinance programme. 'We were providing money to village women to help them start businesses, but there were limitations on that.' For example, if the aim was to get a million women into poultry farming, the lack of a poultry vaccination programme was a problem. 'So we decided we would need to get a poultry vaccination programme going in every village.' This involved training one woman in every village to be a vaccinator, and linking her with the government livestock department. BRAC trained about 70,000 women in as many villages.
But the livestock departments sometimes didn't have the vaccines, and there was also a problem of cold chain maintenance: you have to keep vaccines at a particular temperature or they go off. The solution was to have six or seven BRAC staff maintaining cold chain for the vaccines from the government in Dhaka to the districts. There was also a group to repair the refrigerators in the district livestock departments. 'So we saw to it that the village women got the vaccines they needed.'
But this was by no means the end of it: the next issue was the variety of hens. While the normal local variety of hens give about 60 eggs a year, some hybrid varieties will lay 280 eggs a year. 'So we decided to replace the local variety with hybrids. To do this, we needed poultry farms, hatcheries, so that we could provide day-old chicks to the women. So we went into business. We set up poultry farms, producing 2 million day-old chicks a month. We therefore not only provided women with microfinance to buy the poultry but also supplied the day-old chicks.'
At this stage this wasn't a money-earning venture. The government had poultry farms too, so BRAC charged exactly the same price as the government and in fact made some losses initially. When the government raised prices, it became cost-effective.
But this still isn't the end of the poultry story. The next problem was feed. The best feed is maize, but Bangladesh didn't grow any maize. 'So we went into feed.' For maize-growing, BRAC had to go into a joint venture with an Australian farm. 'In everything that we did, we went into the details of every stage of development.'
… we'll do it ourselves The same was true of BRAC's cow-rearing programme. 'Many women didn't want to go outside the house,' says Abed. 'They wanted a cow so they could just look after it and get milk and sell it.' But it was not that simple, they discovered. 'I went to one of the remotest areas in the north of Bangladesh,' Abed remembers, 'and interviewed a woman who had bought a cow for about $100. She was getting 2 litres of milk a day. So I said, "You must be doing very well." And she said, "No, I'm not doing well because I can't sell my milk, and if I do sell people only pay me 7 taka, which is about a third of the normal price."
'So this made me think that maybe we should set up a milk plant. Collect milk from villages where there's no demand, chill it and bring it back to Dhaka by tanker, pasteurize it, make butter, yoghurt and milk, and sell it in the market. So we did that. Most of the women who were getting very little money for their milk now get double the amount. In order to ensure that women's income went up, we had to get into different kinds of businesses, which did not exist before in Bangladesh.'
Producing iodized salt is another BRAC business. 'I was so mad at the salt-makers,' says Abed. 'Iodine is provided by government, but they wouldn't mix it with the salt because mixing is another operation and it costs money, so they were just throwing it away. We need iodized salt in our country because there are a lot of goitres and so on.' So BRAC hired about ten people to visit salt plants and check whether they were putting iodine into the salt. 'But many of them found that they were not welcome and they were thrown out. In anger I said, I am going to produce salt myself with iodine in it. So we went into the salt business.'
Apart from providing iodized salt themselves, BRAC's move seems to have forced other salt-makers to follow suit. 'Our competitors are now coming back with iodized salt. I suppose in a way we have spurred them into action.' This attitude – if something needs doing, we'll do it ourselves – must surely be one of the key reasons why BRAC has been able to do so much.
These BRAC enterprises now provide 80 per cent of the organization's operating costs, with the rest coming from external donors. Although BRAC's annual report distinguishes 'programme support enterprises' from 'commercial enterprises', in fact all serve the same dual purpose of producing income for BRAC and supporting poor people.
From local to national But although expansion has been so rapid and so dramatic, it is always carefully planned, Abed insists. 'Everything that we do, we always try out in a small area first. We try to become effective – ie we're delivering the service we want to deliver and people are getting what they need – and then we try to become efficient, discarding non-essential tasks. So you are basically looking at what activities you do that are essential and what could be cut out with not much impact on effectiveness. When you are effective and efficient in a small area, you are ready to expand. This is the model for franchising, though in our case this is within the organization.'
Not that a 'small' area here means very small. 'It has to be large enough to have all kinds of problems in it,' explains Abed. With BRAC's tuberculosis control programme, for example, they worked in one area first and then went into ten different areas. When that worked, they were ready to cover the entire country. 'But we have been waiting ten years to get the $100 million we need. We now have $44 million from the Global Fund for Tuberculosis, Malaria and AIDs to start off our tuberculosis control programme. But we were prepared, we had everything worked out. We had the methodology, the infrastructure, the ability to train people, we just needed money. Now we've got it and we're on our way to implementing it.'
Ongoing research and monitoring The oral rehydration programme provides a good example of the sort of tireless research and monitoring of its programmes that BRAC does. When they started to follow up to find out how many women actually used oral rehydration, they found only 6 per cent were doing so. 'We found teachers themselves didn't really believe in what they were teaching; they felt the method was second-rate. So we brought 100 workers to Dhaka and demonstrated the therapy to them and the teaching improved.' (BRAC fully recognizes how vital it is to train people well, with 10 per cent of the salary budget set aside for training.)
The use rate now went up to 18 per cent, which Abed was still not happy with. 'We then discovered you need to teach fathers too, in fact the entire family, the entire community. We started advertising on TV and radio. We went to mosques and marketplaces.' The use rate then started rising, eventually reaching a much healthier 60 per cent. 'Our original conception was just to teach the mother, but it didn't work.'
Working with government For a smaller social enterprise that works with government or other large donors, there can be a danger of getting swamped and not being able to do things in your own way. But working with governments doesn't seem to have been a problem for BRAC.
'By the time we came to larger donors,' says Abed, 'we were mature enough as an organization to deal with them. It was almost 20 years after we started, and we were prepared to meet all kinds of demands that they made of us in terms of reports and so on. They also sent out teams to look at our programmes. Consultants would come from a specific donor like the UK's Department for International Development, or the donor consortium would send four people to come and look at various aspects of our organization and programme. But we came out fairly well in these reports; we were quite good at meeting the objectives and targets set.'
Was there pressure to do things differently from how they wanted to do them? 'Not a great deal,' says Abed. 'There were certain things that we wanted to do that the donors said. "OK, you can do it but we can't give you money for that." But there was no great deal of difficulty with the donors.'
One problem they did have was with bureaucracy within donor organizations, particularly the European Community. 'If they committed funding, it would take about a year to get the money, and by that time I had to borrow money from banks and so on.'
Learning from mistakes What about mistakes? Did BRAC make mistakes along the way as they developed things? 'Continuously,' is Abed's immediate answer. But mistakes were spotted fairly quickly. In fact, as with the other social entrepreneurs who talked to Alliance about learning from mistakes, many of these so-called mistakes are at the conceptual level.
To take a typical example. 'Initially,' says Abed, 'we held dear in our hearts that we should work only for five to ten years in a community. After that poor people would take over and do things themselves.' The idea that poor people, once empowered, should be able to demand services and get them, came from Paulo Freire. 'Otherwise, how do I cover the entire country? But in the end we came to the conclusion that poor people, however much they are empowered, need certain services, and if the government is not providing them, basically we have to be there – providing antenatal care to women, children's healthcare, immunization and so on. So the initial idea of withdrawing from an area had to be adjusted.'
Letting the government off the hook? It seems slightly ironical that BRAC should have started off with the idea of empowering people to demand services from government and ended up providing them itself. In one sense this isn't a problem at all because it works and BRAC is almost self-sustaining. But is BRAC letting the government off the hook?
'In a way we are,' Fazle Abed admits. But the problem as he sees it is that Bangladesh is still very much centrally governed: it doesn't really have a local government structure. 'BRAC could withdraw from rural areas if local government was empowered. So we are now basically demanding from the central government a strong local government structure so that poor people can get services that they now get from us. Putting pressure on central government is much more difficult than putting pressure on local government. Getting government to take responsibility will be possible once we get a local government structure.'
If BRAC is successful in this, it will probably cease to offer certain services, for example primary education. 'Why shouldn't primary education be available to all children? It's compulsory and it's supposed to be provided by the state. We will certainly withdraw from primary education if we can. But that doesn't mean that BRAC will get out of education altogether – we will then move on to secondary education. I'm not worried about losing a particular niche for our work. Needs are always evolving and BRAC will always have work to do.'
Moving into Afghanistan Since June 2002, BRAC has also been working in Afghanistan. In fact, BRAC Afghanistan now has 2,000 staff members – 200 Bangladeshi staff and 1,800 Afghans – working in education, health and income generation. How did this come about?
'Well,' says Abed. 'when I saw 2 million Afghans going back home, I remembered how in 1972 10 million Bangladeshis returned home to Bangladesh. So thought, we have got all the experience of relief and rehabilitation followed by nationwide development. Why don't we send 50 of our staff to Afghanistan? So we sent 50 of our staff initially, and they hired Afghans. We found we had to adapt what we learned in Bangladesh a little, but not a great deal.'
Moving on as leader Fazle Abed founded BRAC in 1972 and has headed the organization for 32 years. At some stage he will presumably want to step down. In fact, he has already taken a step back. For 30 years he was executive director of BRAC, but a couple of years ago he hired a new full-time executive director; he is now the chairperson. 'I want to wean myself gradually out of BRAC,' he says. 'I think if I do it well, and the next leadership continues in the same entrepreneurial fashion, the organization will survive and flourish.'
As it turns out, it has not been that easy to find the right successor. The new executive director came from the government and is an interim appointment. 'I wanted to retire but I couldn't find anybody at that point to take over from me internally. Two or three BRAC people are now vying for the top post, and in the next couple of years we will make the change.' He will stay on as chairman for the time being – 'it's not a big deal.'
Fazle Abed doesn't appear to have too many anxieties about the culture of the organization changing when he does finally manage to leave. Having a long-term BRAC employee taking over the running of the organization will clearly help.
'We have worked so hard on the BRAC culture,' he says. 'The way we operate is very entrepreneurial, we question everything, we're continually learning to do things better. I hope that we will have the same culture in the organization when I am no longer there.'
Transmission of the unique BRAC culture throughout the whole organization is based partly on an extraordinary system of staff reporting. All BRAC's 31,000 staff members report upwards once a month. 'Groups of field workers meet with their immediate supervisor, and those supervisors then meet with their supervisors … and so it percolates upwards.'
This may be time-consuming but it's very important, says Abed. 'Other people in the organization get to understand what's happening in the field; field workers know that what they say is going to percolate up. As a result, no one feels that decision-making is being done in isolation at the top; everybody knows their own views and assessment of the situation will feed into decisions.'
Decisions are in any case taken 'at the lowest possible level rather than at the highest possible level. So if somebody makes a mistake, they can say they have made a mistake, but they must please report it back.'
Fazle Hasan Abed is Founder and Chairperson of BRAC, formerly known as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. An accountant by training and originally by profession, he founded BRAC in 1972 after the war of independence from Pakistan, initially to provide relief and rehabilitation to returning war refugees in a remote area of the country. A year later, the organization turned to long-term poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor, especially women. BRAC works in health, education and microfinance. It is active in 68,408 villages in all the 64 districts of Bangladesh. It has 4.8 million group members, 4.2 million borrowers, and 31,000 one room, one-teacher schools. Eighty per cent of BRAC's annual budget of US$235 million comes from its own enterprises, and 20 per cent from external sources. In June 2002 BRAC Afghanistan was founded. It now runs schools, health centres and credit operations in seven provinces out of twelve. Fazle Hasan Abed has received numerous awards, both nationally and internationally, most recently the Gates Award for Global Health 2004 and the UNDP Mahbub ul Huq Award for Outstanding Contribution in Human Development, 2004.
Meeting 2 chinese graduates (Rhodes & Columbia U scholars) at Abed's 80th birthday party in 2016 was a lucky break for all friends of Abed knowhow. With Shameran Abed and supporting questions from Ali Baba's biographer Ying Lowrey (herself 1a 25 year veteran of SME (Small Medium Enterprise) development across USA) they were able to map at least 20 occasions Abed and China open sourced knowhow with each other - true win-wins- as fazle abed liked to say at the mots fundamental solutions of ending extreme asian village womens poverty there is no comp0etition ; it must need be all collaboration 2020s Think about the next step - if ai (Artificial Intel) is to design autonomous system that help with sdgs - we need the deepest borderless - when larry brilliant ended smallpox on the asian continent this require huge collaboration; you cant make real progress on climate without deep cooperation - nature has the opposite evolutionary rules to most man made border; amd as einstein obeserved - all man's science is an approximation - nature is always governing dynamics at more micro levels than man can measure
..chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk writes: I am white diaspora scot male but i have trouble with my ethnicity- whilst ledd than 20% of huamns - whites have been cause of all world wars; the way scots engined inveneted in 1760 were circulated worldwide ilinked by slavery and genocides explains why as lates as 1950 most people had no access to electricity gripds; whilst all white nations need to declare the wrongs they have not yet reconciled let me stick to brits - helping save europe continent from hitley effectively ended the pound as a viable currency- so what brits did was give out i9nmdependnec ecample to quarter og huamns on sout asian contuent bu without any chnage in the top down and bordered system which had been unse to trap underclasses; the americans who became the worlkd's policeman had no cultral clue about all the conflicts the brits had embedded across asia - they also had their hands full with japan and korea until the last 1950s; by the time they started actively intervening elsewhere things definitely got far worse after death of kennedy ; of course the timing is complicated by this time russia and usa were playing the dismal game of sponsoring alternate dictators across the globe which had nothing to do with the developments of places people--- the good news is there is so much to learn from sur fazle abed who as an 18 year old trekked from then east pakistan; studied engineering at glasgow; became royal dutch shell ceo for his home region before serving poorest peoples for 50 years; unlike leaders top down every decision abed made multiplied positive developments round such basic goals as increasing life expectancy which is win-win across any regions where abnormal numbers of mothers and kids are dying due to lack of last mile service - health, food, wayer, safty....
Back in 1984 i co-authored 2025report.com - we simplifed out hypothesis IF causes exinction of humans this would be consequence of failing to transform education - we have the tech - our under 30s have the brains to unite sdg solutions but whjat do we need to do to education to empower youth to bring us muddled elders back from the brink?
