Fazle Hasan Abed is the founder and currently the Chairperson of BRAC, one of the largest NGOs in the world. Born in Sylhet, Bangladesh in 1936 he was educated in Dhaka and Glasgow Universities and qualified as a chartered management accountant in London where he entered a professional career with Shell Oil Company. Following the war of independence from Pakistan, Mr. Abed founded BRAC in 1972, initially to provide relief and rehabilitation to returning war refugees in a remote area of the country. A year later the organisation turned towards long-term poverty alleviation and empowerment of poor, especially women

BRAC today works in health, education, social development and microfinance and is active in 68,408 villages in all 64 districts of Bangladesh. It has 5.06 million group members, 4.30 million borrowers and 48 thousand one-room, one-teacher schools. Eighty percent of BRAC’s annual budget of US$254 million comes from its own socially useful commercial enterprises and 20 percent from external sources. BRAC has also taken the initiative to reach out to the 25% of absolute poorest falling on the bottom rung of the poverty ladder through its Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction – Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR-TUP) programme. In June, 2002, BRAC Afghanistan was established which now runs schools, health centres and credit operations in 19 provinces of Afghanistan out of thirty-four. In early 2005 BRAC started relief and rehabilitation operation in post-Tsunami Sri Lanka and now plans to initiate development programmes in Africa.

Fazle Hasan Abed has been recognised through number of national and international awards including The Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1980), UNESCO Noma Prize for Literacy (1985), UNICEF's Maurice Pate Award (1992), Olof Palme Award (2001), the Gates Award for Global Health (2004) and the UNDP Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution in Human Development (2004) and two honorary doctorate degrees from Queen's University, Canada (1994) and University of Manchester, UK (2003). Besides acting as a visiting scholar for Harvard University in 1981-82 he has held numerous board appointments with a number of international organisations.

Detailed biography available at www.brac.net/chairperson.htm