ACT&Learn as BRAC becomes meta-women!

There is an urban legend that Steve Jobs wife at a millennium goals party asked fazle Abed to extend 30 years of Knowhow of women of Bangladesh/Asian Rural Advancement Collabs to all 21st C women- NOW! through the 2020s coming of the metaverse --- METAWOMEN. 

While we cannot confirm the rumor- on the ground ABEDmooc.com provides diaries of 30 greatest collaborations up to 2019 that Abed and 1billiongirls could find partners for;  

WHATS NEXT AS HUMANITY LEAPS PAST COVID INTO 2020s WITH SUSTAINABILITY ALL TO PLAY FOR? Can you help map 21st C connectors with Abed did through is last 2 decades, and onwards! see www.sdgs.games and NFTsdgs.com and 17sdgoods.com and www.sdGOATs.com

In memoriam - Sir Fazle died 20 December 2019 - those with deepest professional queries should aim to talk to his son shameran abed - 

any errors reporting below solely mine chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk bethesda MD and flatiron nY

this web is edited by or with hundreds of young journalists and students of abed we met and hubbed through 16 trips to Dhaka in  2010s after japan Ambassador had kindly invited Fazle Abed to chair 2 brainstorming diners in remembrance of The Economist's Biographer of Von Neumann Quiz (what to dom with 100 times more tech every decade 2025-1945) and Entrepreneurial Revolutionary Norman Macrae (aka dad0. Abed chose future of education (particularly roles of university and playschool) and future of distriburtd fintech - can you help us update 2020s futures (fusion of edtech & fintech round any goal your comunity loves most) the way Abed would have intended girls and boys to "meta-lise) - 

 

Fazle Abed's -once Royal Dutch Shell's most promising young asian oil company engineer dedicated the last 50 years of his life to ending poverty - some people say he helped a billaon asian women

•  change how aid  (world economic models)invested in them; 
• he helped them design new education systems from playschools to collaboration umiversities (see the world top 2 education laurate networks - hong kong yidan and qatar first lady's wise; 
• others say he empowered last mile village health in partnershp with ynucef's james grant 
• - or he fed mch of south asi8a tripical vailges linking in norlaug alymbin and expoentially started climate adpatation ynuting vilage green belt movements across contients
• - actually he do9d all of above4 and designed over 30 of the most extrodrinary colaborations if you valye 1000000 person lives matter commynuty building gravitaed by intergenerational love of mothers -he did this in 3 phase
•  plase 1 25 years with no elctricity;
•  pgase 2 next 20 years wi9thh solar and mobile; 
• phase 3 the legacy he barinstormed with alomst every asian ambassadior how to connect sdgs with the new electricity ai and convergence of tech sunce 1951 wheb von neumann alumbi promised 100 times mkore tech per decade (but who would this be sgared wiuth - firtuantely abed partners chose to share the last million times more tecfh 2025-1995 with bulluion poorest asian womens roots 

interviewer: health, education, credit- is there a blueprint for being world's largest and most collaborative NGO?  whats your/BRAC own foundation - how do you start in a new country?

Abed: our focus is poor people, in almost all cases poor people need more opportunities with  income and employment, in some cases they also need education for their children or  health systems, so we have developed over the years ways of dealing with multiple needs of poor people- we have always felt we need to create enabling conditions for poor people to act on  their own behalf -- most of the work is done by the poor people themselves BRAC is only providing opportunties for them

interviewer: how do you succeed both in scaling but always keeping anchored on poor?

(video timeline) 20.44 firstly rural advancement has always meant our primary mission is for poor- poor peoples dreams and struggles are our work-  (our entrepreneurial revolution concerns taking our programs out to rural even when they could be more profitable in city)

scale gravitates round capacity to recruit people - quality HR and training to do national programs - internally audit infrastructure to check funds keep being spent to anchoring poorest- BRAC has had the good fortune- and the privilege-  to find donors who love scaling up a franchise once its demonstrated to work. Oral Rehydration gave us the opportunity to celebrate the most economical life saving community health network of all but open sourcing such a freedom across 16 million rural households without electricity let alone a telephone in 1980 turned out to need trust in grassroots action learning networking of an unprecedented kind. Back then, it was tough to sell empowerment to the development sector's top professionals

ORAL REHYDRATION EXAMPLE OF TRAINING FRANCHISE 3ES- Effective, Efficient, Expansion Effectiveness took us a year and 3 iterations -here's the how and why: 1979 international year of child - we wanted to do something big -the biggest infant killer was diarrhea- so we thought if we teach mothers oral rehydration (mixing water ,sugar, salt in correct proportions) go to  all 16 million rural households in bangladesh - first 30000 pilot  -we found only 6% used so we were disappointed but we found out our oral rehydration teachers didnt believe in OR themselves (ie they would buy a pill) so we retrained them;  and we hoped for our next 30000 wave - this went up but only to 19% - still very disheartened - so whats the problem - we sent anthropologists to 6800 households- the problem was the men , they dissuaded women telling them to get a pill for the infant=- so we decided our program was wrong by failing to include men - before our next wave we gathered men together in the village and went to mosques on friday prayers, went to market places, made radio broadcasts- so all told it took us about a year and a half before we got the training program to be effective then efficiency means cutting out  redundancy- g we found that instead of training each mother alone in her home- we could teach 3 neighbours at a time- EDUCATION min 6.20 trust in the community is what we seek to build- so for example when the community needs childrens education we train a teacher in the village  .... in Bangladesh we evolved 40000 one room village schools each with 1 teacher and 30 children; over the years we have educated 10 million children, 7 million girls recently we have been looking at south sudan where nearly 1 million children need education- we are trying to empower villagers to develop same sort of schooling model 12.10 we are interested in child centred learning- over the year we've followed up surveys of which nations are best at what and borrowed nationals- so dutch provide best teaching in maths and second language :  italians best for preschool education montessori; swedes best for adult education  germans manage education systems so teachers teach more hours; japanese are best at science education - usa good at phd education - new zealand best for mother tongue- ( eg tips get children reading as fast as possible, and writing but dont worry too much too early about their spelling ) 1730 at clinton global 2015 partners linked around BRAC announced  vast scaling of education of girls - eg BRAC will be raising additional 238 million dollars over next 5 years - same countries but more work -mainly primary and secondary some tertiary   (there are lots of opportunities- our bangladeshi alumni are exploring  girl graduates into china..) interviewer  34.4 - considering violence and education could you tell us how brac managed to develop in afghanistan 7000 schools for girls?  36.10 ABED: we assume that a purpose of development is to change culture - for girls to be educated- we wanted that to happen in Afghanistan so we accepted the need to start in a culturally appropriate way. In Afghanistan this means girls being chaperoned in groups of 15 by an elder woman to and from schools. While this costs us a bit more it is worth it to get the Taliban's approval. On this practical detail, we can wait until girls themselves bring about intergenerational change CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT INVESTING IN ULTRA POOR 53.00 We did some research and it showed we were not reaching the 10% poorest. Rectifying this became a priority 58,30 Here's our corrective. We get villagers to identify the 10% of poorest mothers who are too poor to benefit from eg microcredit. So for a 2 year period we give an ultra poor a grant instead of a loan -perhaps to buy a cow or something similar. We give them a stipend, we make sure health service and education for their children  are freely accessed. So over the 2 year period everything is done to integrate their livelihoods back into the community. Moreover the village committee looks out for them too. If for example their animal is stolen, the village committee sorts that out. We have been doing this for 15 years now in Bangladesh, and we have a 95% success rate. In that after 2 years the mother  has ended ultra-poor status and is using our normal services (suc as microcredit) to sustain their livelihoods. Frontieres Challenge With funding from World Bank, and Ford Foundation , we are extending this to 10 countries and these ultra poor process extensions are being independently tracked by Poverty Lab at MIT and at Yale and London School of Economics (conditional cash transfer program tanzania could move over to this) ENTERPRISES interviewer - can you tell us a bit about how you created over quarter a million jobs for poorest by redesigning Bangladesh's dairy value chain -quite bold of you? ABED : a burning question for me was why does Bangladesh  have to import powder milk- but we had to be patient, you see back in the 1970s Europe was still producing butter mountains so the pricing was wrong however after Maastrich treaty euro-cow subsidies began to be cut and so by early 1990s bangla could compete-it was the right time to reform the whole sector so why not do that so the poorest could be integral players? and do that so any profit BRAC makes by leading the value chain can be reinvested back in the whole of BRAC's sustainability Interviewer- how do you see BRAC's sustainability? In 2014 our operating budget was about 862 million dollars. Because of moving into enterprises over the years, we have reduced our donor dependency to 32% of budget. My goal is to get to 90% self-financed but not 100% because I still want to be at cutting edge which would be proven by donors still wanting to fund BRAC! 9.45 WE focus particularly on women as agents of change- 95% of our microcredit clients are women -7.9 mn in Bangladesh; 180000 uganda   120000 in tanzania  - I have seen many defeated men, but never a defeated woman In more detail, a survey showed that about a third of loans is used by women to start up their own business, about a third becomes a joint start-up with their husband, and the other third is passed on to the husband, so there is a sharing going on. But that wouldn't have happened if we ad targeted men as microcredit customers. We see it as the women who manage poverty (their family's food, their children's health) so why shouldn't  they be empowered to manage development? In Bangladesh we have also been funding suitable small enterprises by men or by women through BRAC bank.We have 280000 small or medium enterprises  borrowing from BRAC bank typically taking out loans between 5000 to 50000 dollars. Unlike the individual livelihood loans of microcredit these businesses are also employing people So BRAC bank not restricted to women but we have a women's wing of  BRAC bank === interviewer 37.30 can you describe what the role of technology is in what brac does and about the  bkash story as one of the fastest webs of change ever seen?  fazle:  mobile tech has big specially impact in places like bangladesh -remember the context at the start of the 1990s there were only about  4 phones of any sort per thousand people - now 100 million mobile pones. So the impact is huge and hopefully so will be the learning.. Yes bkash is proving a huge opportunity. When does it benefit poor to have cashless banking - ie points on your mobile phone to trade with or convert back to cash if needed at local agents across the country. For example, the poorest never previously had a safe way to save other than under their bed! There are lots more opportunities. We can work out algorithms so that we can offer suitable credit - and ten remittances; and then credit for family emergencies -so this is introducing a whole new dimension to poor people's financial inclusion

What 4 decades of exponential progress on ending poverty means in Bangladesh born as independent nation in 1971 after war of independence with Pakistan - born 2nd poorest nation in world progress bangla as made form 2nd porest natuon in world agriculture:  10 million tons of rice was 3 million deficient now rise to 35 million though our population now 160 million as gone up 2.2 fold -so we are just at stage of exporting food life expectancy was 47 now 70  ;infant mortality used to be 250/1000 to 40/1000 ;maternal used to 800 per 100000 live births now 150 per 100000; i(n Europe it is 10 per 100000) women used to produce 6.2 children now down 2.2 literacy rates used to be 25% now up to 65% primary schools girls used to be 45% and boys 75% with average 60% its now 95% for all  (above statistics quote by Sir Fazle here) many organisations connected with this check out  BRAC connectivity across this compass brac set up a research and valuation department in 1975....-part of the ethos of not being afraid to learn from when we were not succeeding - and focused on long run impact http://research.brac.net/new/ quite early on we were surprised to find that few organisations wanted to replicate (our) solutions  - so we determined BRAC should have the capacity  to scale nationally any effective and efficient program  such scaling needs a lot of doing! -HR  to recruit - training capacity; accounting services; internal audit department to check zero corruption etc -  .by urgent location or issue partners BRAC ebola BRAC mobile money innovation BRAC social innovation lab Frugal innovation summit Uganda- BRAC's fastest scaling partners Lab in Africa with Mastercardfoundation & ... Gates Foundation and DFID prioritise development of Tanzania with BRAC George Soros prioritises development of Liberia BRAC internet - partners Japan-US-Bangla MyBrac beta with Duke U World Bank prioritises Ultra Poor collaboration networking brac's home web 1 2 3 4 fan web of sir fazle abed About BRAC Partners Strategic Partners Institutional Donors Government Alliances Corporate Alliances Implementation Partners Knowledge Partners Partnerships for BRAC International OVERVIEW enterprises AARONG BRAC ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION BRAC CHICKEN BRAC COLD STORAGE BRAC DAIRY BRAC FEED MILLS BRAC FISHERIES BRAC POULTRY BRAC PRINTING PACK BRAC RECYCLED HANDMADE PAPER BRAC SALT BRAC SANITARY NAPKINS AND DELIVERY KITS BRAC SERICULTURE BRAC TEA ESTATES indirect impacts- whole some aspects of the garment industry are unacceptable, Bangladeshi's are proud to be te second largest garment producer in the world (beating eg India to that title); if BRAC schools hadnt educated so many girls in the 70s and 80s the garment industry would never had ad te capacity to be a world leader  BRAC bank and microfinance disbursed 2.8 billion dollars in loans last year (2013)

1.20 Sir Fazle to finish: what new programs would you like

high school quality education - one of our disappointments historically  in Bangladesh has been we've not not been able to influence national system (the 90% that is government run -  we couldn't transfer what works in our school up the goverment-run system

so when set up brac university, our first graduate program was teacher training which we started to offer in partbnersip with Columbia University -now 54 out of 64 districts in Bangladesh have got one of their education leaders to take an MA  with brac; so now we can help curriculum development across all of Bangladesh - so brac uni can do what brac could alone could not

Another section of Brac Univerity offers a 4 year midwife course.