BRAC believes that poverty is a system and its underlying causes are manifold and interlinked. Some of these linkages are obvious, for example, a day’s wage forgone because of illness or resources lost to a natural disaster. Others play a more indirect role in perpetuating poverty, such as lack of awareness about laws and rights can lead not only to outright exploitation, but also encourage a lack of accountability on the part of the state to cater to its most vulnerable citizens.

In order for the poor to come out of poverty, they must have the tools to fight it across all fronts. We have, therefore, developed support services in the areas of human rights and social empowerment, education and health, economic empowerment and enterprise development, livelihood training, environmental sustainability and disaster preparedness.

We operate social enterprises that are strategically connected to our development programmes, and form crucial value chain linkages which increase the productivity of our members’ assets and labour, and reduce risks of their enterprises. These enterprises, ranging from agriculture to handicrafts, also help to make us increasingly self-reliant.

Gender equality, respect for the environment and inclusivity are themes crosscutting all of our activities.

To ensure that we are always learning and that our work is always relevant, we have put in place training, research and monitoring systems across all our activities and financial checks and balances in the form of audits. As a knowledge centre, we have opened our doors to the wider public in an effort to develop national capacity in Bangladesh through BRAC University.

But what we really do is best portrayed in the true life stories of those who make the real changes.

Empowerment

Community empowerment

Gender justice and diversity

Human rights and legal aid service