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Pioneering programme helps households climb out, and stay out, of extreme poverty
A programme pioneered by development organisation BRAC, which aims to help households escape extreme poverty by supporting women to set up their own small businesses, not only works but its benefits increase in the long term, according to an evaluation(1) led by researchers at the International Growth Centre (IGC), based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The research findings in published today in London.
BRAC’s ‘Targeting the Ultra-Poor’ programme has benefitted 1.6 million households in Bangladesh by helping the very poorest women shift out of low paid and insecure work, such as casual agricultural work or domestic service, into running their own small businesses. It does this by providing them with large scale livestock assets alongside two years of complementary training.
Researchers found that, four years after taking part in the programme, the women increase their annual earnings by 37 per cent.
Seven years after the start of the programme, the increase in the women’s spending on non-durable goods, such as food, is 2.5 times larger than after four years. At the start of the programme, only 10 per cent of beneficiaries have access to renting or owning land – seven years later, this figure is nearly 40 per cent.
Four years after the programme is implemented, there is an eight percentage point decline in the number of households living on less than $1.25 per day(2). Households who benefit from the programme continue to climb out of poverty at a steady rate seven years later(3).
Oriana Bandiera, Professor of Economics at LSE and one of the authors of the study, said: “Our study is significant because it is one of the most extensive and long term evaluations of these types of anti-poverty livelihood programmes. This allows us to see that that the transformative effects of BRAC’s approach are sustainable and therefore life changing for the ultra-poor households who take part. When you trust the poor with assets and train them with the necessary skills, they do better and better, year after year.”
BRAC founder Sir Fazle Hasan Abed said, “It is our aim to meet the first sustainable development goal and end extreme poverty by 2030. Through this programme and the results of our ongoing research, we know this approach works to move the ultra-poor into sustainable livelihoods and help them increase their incomes. We are working this way in Pakistan and South Sudan as well as Bangladesh. Other organisations are also replicating this model, which is encouraging. I believe ultra-poor graduation approaches can make a major contribution to ending extreme poverty.”
The research also highlights a new finding about the nature of poverty – the poorest are neither unwilling nor unfit to engage in the same jobs as more prosperous women in their communities, but face barriers which prevent them from doing so. Before having access to BRAC’s programme, it was predominantly higher earning women who could access more stable and productive work such as rearing livestock. This work generates on average more than double the hourly earnings of the irregular and poorly paid jobs that the ‘ultra-poor’ are limited to such as casual agricultural work or domestic service.
On average, for every £1 invested in the programme there was a return of £5.40.The women who participate shift their working hours from casual wage labour towards rearing livestock and, in doing so, increase the number of hours they work and their earnings.
The researchers compared the employment opportunities and choices of the women who participated in the BRAC programme with women across different wealth classes. They tracked over 21,000 households over seven years, including 6,700 ultra-poor households and 15,100 from other wealth classes.
Aspects of BRAC’s ‘Targeting the Ultra-Poor’ programme have been replicated by other organisations across Africa, Asia and Latin America and have had very positive results in increasing consumption for the extreme poor(4).
BRAC has a strategic partnership with UK Aid and Australia in Bangladesh, providing large scale funding to BRAC’s ‘Ultra-Poor’ programme for many years. International Development Minister Desmond Swayne said: “The UK is proud of our partnership with BRAC and the Australian Government in Bangladesh. Over the last 5 years UK support has so far enabled BRAC to lift 580,000 people out of extreme poverty and delivered health, education, water and sanitation to the poorest and most marginalised. Earlier this year I saw first-hand the difference this work is making to people across Bangladesh. BRAC’s programme targeting the ‘ultra-poor’ is of great significance to development worldwide and the global goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030.”
Leaving it behind
12 December, 2015
An Economist article
In a small hut overlooking a muddy river, a dozen women are trying to explain how they fell into destitution. After a few stories of husbands falling ill or vanishing, of ill-paid work drying up, of children sickening, of resorting to begging, almost all are crying. This is quite usual, says Sagarika Indu. BRAC, the large aid organisation she works for, has chosen these women and about 1.6m others since 2002 precisely because they are among the most desperate, ground-down people in one of the world’s poorest places.
But then something unexpected happens: the women invite your correspondent to visit again in a couple of years. Is this mere politeness or confidence in the future? It could be either—because they are very likely to be much better off by then.
Roughly 700m people are thought to live in extreme poverty, defined as getting by on less than $1.90 a day. That is huge progress: more than 1.9 billion lived on less than the equivalent amount in 1990. Yet the gains are uneven. Poverty has plummeted in China but declined more slowly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. And the poor are diverse. Among them are a particularly desperate bunch: the “ultra-poor”, who routinely go hungry. In Bangladesh, most are landless, illiterate rural women with children.
In the 1990s it became clear that microfinance, then the most exciting tool in development economics, was not reaching the very poorest people, recalls Sir Fazle Abed, BRAC’s founder. Microlenders offer small loans at lower interest rates than moneylenders charge. Costs are kept down by assembling small groups of borrowers and encouraging them to exert pressure on each other to repay their loans. One reason the poorest were not borrowing, Sir Fazle says, was that other villagers viewed them as hopeless cases.
BRAC came up with a scheme to help the ultra-poor. It gives them a small stipend for food, followed by an asset such as a cow or a few goats, which they are expected to manage. Field workers visit weekly for the next two years, teaching recipients, for example, how to tell when a cow is in heat and how to get it inseminated. The aim is to help women “graduate” from extreme poverty to the normal kind—as Sir Fazle puts it, “to help them back into the mainstream of poor people”. Then, perhaps, they can start borrowing.
Later research showed that microfinance was not the cure-all that had been thought. But BRAC’s graduation programme proved highly effective. Large randomised controlled trials (explained in the next article) show that it makes people wealthier and raises their spending on food and durable goods. It works outside Bangladesh, too. A study published earlier this year in Science showed that similar programmes run by other NGOs boosted consumption in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Pakistan and Peru, with the effects lasting at least a year after they ended. The only failure was in Honduras, where many of the chickens given as assets died.
Such programmes are pricey. In India and Bangladesh they cost more than $1,000 per household at purchasing power parity. In Peru, where field workers are better paid, the cost was $5,742. If they are to expand—and about 30 countries are mulling or testing them—two questions must be answered. Do the recipients stay out of deep poverty or slip back? And how exactly do they work?
The results of two big research projects, presented at a conference in London on December 9th, provided some powerful hints. Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that women who were offered cows, goats and intensive training in the Indian state of West Bengal not only did not fall back into indigent poverty but kept climbing out of it. Seven years after the programme began their average monthly consumption was almost one-third higher than it had been after two years. The gap between these women and the untreated control group grew much wider.
Other research explains why. Oriana Bandiera and Robin Burgess, both of the London School of Economics, and four others followed 21,000 people in 1,309 Bangladeshi villages. They tracked ultra-poor women, some of whom were randomly assigned to the graduation programme, and also kept an eye on everyone else. Of the 21,000, only 6,700 were deeply poor at the start. The rest were a mixture of fairly poor, middle class and upper class (by rural Bangladeshi standards, that is: they do not swan around in Hermès).
The poorest women, it turned out, did far more hours of income-generating work: 991 per year on average, compared with 553 for middle-class ones. Yet they packed them into fewer days: the average ultra-poor woman worked for only 252 days a year, compared with 302 for a middle-class woman and 325 for an upper-class one.
The reason is that they toil mostly as domestic servants and in the fields—and casual agricultural work is seasonal. During planting and harvest they work extremely hard; the rest of the year they do little. Better-off women usually rear livestock, which is not only steady work but pays about twice as much per hour. When the poorest women are given cows, they quickly fill their idle time (see chart). They also cut back a little on domestic and field labour.
This is a clue to why microfinance does not reach the poorest. Ms Bandiera and Mr Burgess estimate that the internal rate of return for ultra-poor women going through the graduation programme is between 16% and 23% per year, depending on the assumed opportunity cost of time. That is roughly the interest rate on a microloan. So it ought to be worthwhile for a poor woman to borrow money to buy a cow (and returns would be even higher if they did not require the training BRAC’s field workers provide). The problem is that no microlender would lend them that much.
Some questions remain. The big one is whether the schemes would work in cities. Slum-dwellers are seldom as indigent as agricultural labourers, but they can still get trapped in poverty, and cannot be rescued by gifts of cows. Urban populations are growing so much faster than rural ones that this question is becoming urgent. Another is whether the programme can be run more cheaply. BRAC will soon test sending field workers to visit each recipient once a fortnight instead of once a week.
Their words are heard
For all the advances in research, some things defy measurement. Near Bonabalia, another group of women, recent graduates of the ultra-poor programme, have gathered. What is striking is not so much their greater wealth (reflected in their finer saris and mobile phones) but the way they stand straighter, and their direct looks. Their relatives have started talking to them. Asked to explain how their lives have changed, one of the first things they say is that they now get invited to weddings.
The Ministry of Industries (MoI), Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), BRAC held a series of events on Nutrition and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and BRAC held a series of events to discuss Nutrition and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): New Approaches to Partnership. The activities concluded today 2nd December with interactive knowledge sharing and a field visit at Palash Upazila (Sub-District), Narshingdi (District) in which the GAIN Global Board Members took part. GAIN’s discussion on SDGs started with a dialogue with government officials on 29 November where the Honourable Minister of Commerce Mr Tofail Ahmed M.P. was present as the Chief Guest.
The Honourable Minister of Commerce Mr. Tofail Ahmed M.P. attended the event as Chief Guest and Professor Dr. Gowher Rizvi, International Affairs Advisor to the honourable Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was the special guest. Panel discussion was facilitated by Executive Director of GAIN, Marc Van Ameringen and discussants included, Mr. Md. Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan ndc, Secretary Ministry of Industries and Mr. Syed Monjurul Islam, Secretary Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Laurent Umans, First Secretary, Food Security from the Netherland Embassy and Heather McBride, Deputy Director, Planning and Lead Analyst from the Canadian High Commission. The event was well attended by representatives from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Food, ERD the Social Development Fund, USAID, UNICEF and the European Union.
On 30 November the discussion focused on nutrition and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which was jointly organised by BRAC and GAIN. Dr. Kaosar Afsana, Director of BRAC Health, Nutrition and Population Programme (HNPP), Executive Director of GAIN, Marc Van Ameringen and Dr. Tahmeed Ahmed, Director, Nutrition and Clinical Services Division, icddr,b facilitated the event. Dr. Muhammed Musa, Executive Director of BRAC and Vinita Bali, Chair of the GAIN Board gave opening remarks. The Honourable Finance Minister Mr Abul Maal Abdul Muhith M.P. attended the event as Chief Guest and Mr Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan, Secretary of Ministry of Industry was the Special Guest. The founder and chairperson of BRAC, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed KCMG attended as a Special Guest and the event was attended by officials of different ministries of Government of Bangladesh, Board of Directors of GAIN Development, Civil Society and private sector partners and research organisations. Panel discussants included Dr. Khairul Hassan, Deputy Chief (Health), Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Dr. Md. Quamrul Islam, Director, IPHN and Line Director, NNS, Mr. Shawn Baker Director of Nutrition, Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Dr. Stanley Zlotkin Chief, Global Child Health, Hospital for Sick Children, Canada, Mr. Laurent Umans, First Secretary, Food Security, The Royal Netherlands Embassy, Ms. Christa Räder Country Representative WFP, Dr. Md. Ataur Rahman Health & Nutrition Adviser Canadian High Commission, Dr. Jiban Krishna Biswas, Director General, Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), Ministry of Agriculture , Mr. Michael Anderson, Chief Executive Officer, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Mr. Omar Dary Senior Nutrition Adviser, USAID, Ms. Anuradha Narayan Chief, Nutrition Section, UNICEF and Ms. Abi Masefield NAS, Consultant, European Union.
Honourable Finance Minister Mr Muhith M.P. said, “Bangladesh has broken the shackles of extreme poverty through combined efforts of Government, NGOs, academia and private sector”. He also stressed on the importance of research based initiatives to tackle hindrances like poverty and malnutrition.
Sir Fazle emphasised in frugal innovations in bringing nutritious food at the door steps of people. He shared his experience on how BRAC addressed the condition of iodine deficiency in Bangladesh with a holistic approach including setting up salt mills to produce iodised salt. Sir Abed said, “To scale up nutrition intervention, a multi sectorial approach is necessary”. He also added that “the incidence of malnutrition is widespread not because of lack of food but because of lack of knowledge. Therefore, primary and secondary education curriculum may consider including relevant content on nutrition”. He also urged Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to step forward and persuade ministry of education to make this happen.
Mr Mosharraf Bhuyian, Secretary, Ministry of Industries, said, “The government of Bangladesh is committed to support the cause of combating micronutrient deficiency in Bangladesh. The Ministry of Industries has taken the lead in the Universal Salt Iodisation programme, with the goal of alleviating iodine deficiency by 2030. Mr Bhuyian highlighted the recent success of mandatory fortification of edible oil with Vitamin A as is a good example of a cost effective, scalable intervention.
Mr Jay Naidoo, the Chair of the Partnership Council of GAIN concluded the event with a vote of thanks.
Young coders develop app solutions on social problems
“BRACathon”- BRAC’s first ever hackathon attracted more than 120 budding app developers and students to compete for prize and developing useful mobile applications to contribute in social innovation. The 36 hour long BRACathon took place from 4-5 December 2015 in BRAC University. 27 teams including IT students and tech start-ups participated.
The theme of BRACathon was technology for social good. The participating teams were given 11 problems including TB prevention, micro-learning, microfinance data access, crowdsourcing information for city roads improvement, bKash user interface etc. Students from BRAC University, NSU, IUB, BUET, Ahsanullah University and technology start-ups including EMPOWER, Miyaki participated in this competition.
After the marathon 36 hours of coding, each team gave a presentation on their mobile app solution, in front of a jury board of 12 members. The jury board members included senior management from BRAC, representatives from DFID and Australian High Commission, faculties from BUET and BRAC University.
Based on the quality of the proposal, impact, innovation, functionality and presentation seven teams were announced as winners on 6th December 2015. Each of these seven teams will be given up to USD 3000 in order to help them to finalise their apps. BRAC IT specialists will provide further assistance and guidance to these young developers to scale up. In addition to this, BRAC will also help them implement these apps to enhance its operational efficiency.
The winners of the competition are Reboot, Miaki, AMITIE ,mPower Rangers, TRIUMPH IT, BUET Gamechangers and Technolive.
The award giving ceremony started with a panel discussion. Mr Anir Chowdhury, Policy advisor of prime minister’s office, Paul Whittingham, Deputy Country Representative, DFID Bangladesh were present among the other sector specialists. The discussion was moderated by BRAC and BRAC International’s senior director Asif Saleh.
Appreciating BRAC’s initiative at the prize giving ceremony, Mr Anir Chowdhury said, “Digital Bangladesh allows one person to do a lot of innovation. Digitalisation gives empowerment if used correctly. Digital Bangladesh provides the opportunity of young leadership.”
Deputy country representative of DFID Paul Whittingham, “We are committed to bring more young people in this field, so the voices are heard across. The best way to ensure that is through technology.”
Borlaug Lecture: "Empowering the Poor in the Fight Against Hunger"
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed
Borlaug Lecture, Iowa State University
12 October 2015
"President Leath, faculty, student, ladies and gentleman,
Each year the World Food Prize Laureate delivers the Borlaug Lecture here at Iowa State University, principally on the subject agricultural science and its potential to advance human progress. Not being an agricultural scientist myself, I have worked most of my life not primarily on science but chiefly on the empowerment of human beings to defeat poverty and hunger. I trust the agricultural community will not be disappointed by this presentation.
Almost 45 years ago, in December 1970, Norman Borlaug delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm. The Green Revolution was still in its infancy, yet it had already delivered spectacular increases in cereal crop yields in India, West Pakistan and the Philippines; and, as Borlaug rightly pointed out, for the millions who had long lived with daily hunger and were now fed by its bountiful harvests, the transformation of the Green Revolution must have seemed like a miracle.
At the time, the Green Revolution had still barely touched my native Bangladesh, then called East Pakistan. I was 34 years old in late 1970, living a comfortable life as a senior executive at Shell Oil, and going through a transformation of my own. A terrible cyclone had struck the coast of Bangladesh, killing hundreds of thousands of mainly poor people. The cyclone made me question the value my comfortable corporate life in the face of such death and devastation.
Within a year, another cataclysm struck -- a war for independence in which 10 million people left the country, most of them on foot, fleeing the Pakistan Army's attacks on the civilian population. Our independence struggle, aided by India, was short lived. By the end of 1971, an independent Bangladesh was born.
Tonight, 44 years later, I am able to look back at a life dedicated to eradicating poverty, hunger, illiteracy and exploitation. I would like to share some of the things I have learned on this journey, particularly about the relationship between hunger, poverty and powerlessness.
We knew the process of rebuilding Bangladesh would be immense. It was one of the poorest countries on earth when we achieved our independence: Life expectancy at birth was a mere 46 years, and one in four children died before their fifth birthday. Our main crop was rice, but only 10 per cent of cultivated land was irrigated, and we produced less than 11 million metric tonnes per year, against a need of about 14 million to feed our people.
The land was overcrowded, and population growth was out of control. The average woman bore more than six children. To give you a sense of the population density of Bangladesh, consider that our land area is almost exactly the same as the state of Iowa's; yet our population in 1971 was 70 million, about 22 times that of Iowa, and today we are 50 times the population of Iowa.
In 1972, I started a relief effort in a remote area in the northeast of the country called Shalla to help returning refugees from the war. Their homes and means of livelihood had been completely destroyed, and the vast majority of them lacked the resources to rebuild their lives in any meaningful way.
My personal transformation was now complete. While I valued the skills I had acquired working in the private sector, after confronting the conditions of poverty found in Shalla, I knew there was no way I could return to a comfortable corporate life. I resolved to commit the rest of my life to helping the poor extricate themselves from poverty. The organization now known as BRAC was born.
Today, thanks in large part to the empowerment of women, Bangladesh has seen one of the most dramatic declines in fertility rates ever seen, from an average of 6.4 children per woman to just 2.1. Changes in other basic indicators of quality of life, including life expectancy, child mortality and maternal mortality, have been equally dramatic.
The road here wasn't easy. We worked hard to address the causes, not merely the symptoms, of Bangladesh's widespread and deeply entrenched poverty and hunger. I understood that simple relief work, such as replacing destroyed homes and distributing food and medicine, would do little to solve the underlying problems. So we turned to the long-term development of human potential -- not limiting ourselves to one area, such as health, education, agriculture, or livelihoods, but working in all these sectors, applying a holistic set of solutions and evaluating the results along the way.
We were eager to be as effective as possible and learn from our mistakes. We introduced cooperative agricultural schemes, literacy programs, health care and family planning, credit support for landless farmers, and much more besides. I could see that, just as poverty does not have one simple cause, it could not have one easy solution.
For a country in chaos, the work of Norman Borlaug, M.S. Swaminathan and others making advances in food science, together with the news of what had been accomplished by the farmers in India, were a message of hope.
It gave us confidence that, if we worked hard and brought these technologies and methods to our farmers in Shalla, they would see similar gains. When I wrote our first major funding proposal for Oxfam, I was naive enough to think that we could triple rice yields and completely eliminate adult illiteracy within our intervention area within five years.
In fact, we failed in many of our first efforts. As I look back on our initial optimism, I am struck by how much we have learned.
After working in Shalla for some time, I began to see a more deep-rooted problem of powerlessness among the poor -- a lack of agency, a lack of control over even the smallest aspects of their lives. Eventually, in our efforts to empower them, we entered into a series of dialogues with the villagers. We began an adult education program based on group discussions, employing the teaching methodologies of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire.
Like Norman Borlaug, Freire was a visionary who inspired me greatly. For him, lifting people out of poverty, hunger and oppression was part of the process of "humanisation," as he wrote in his seminal work "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." According to Freire, humanisation is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and violence; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice. This book was first published in English in 1970 so, like the Green Revolution, his ideas were fresh at the time. I believe they are as important today as they were then.
When we began, I was convinced -- as I remain convinced today -- that, to achieve real empowerment, people need to be aware of their situation and develop a sense of self-worth in order to change it.
During our literacy classes, the teachers acted as facilitators of discussions which explored the true meanings of words as perceived through the life experiences of the learners themselves. This was a learning process for us as well as the students. We developed 100 lessons, each based on a key word, and discussions focused on these words.
One of the first words in our curriculum was "hunger," or upash in the Bengali language. People in the villages were very familiar with this word and concept, and the discussions became quite animated. Anyone who has ever felt pangs of hunger would have a visceral sense of what hunger is, but those who had suffered from chronic hunger had a deeper perspective. They said that being hungry was like being in prison, locked away in a cage, isolated from others, and unable to communicate with anyone else, except for others who were also hungry and in a similar state of powerlessness.
Breaking free from that cage, we learned, was not as easy as we had initially hoped. Farmers' habits were deeply ingrained and would not change overnight. The vast majority of the crops were rain-fed, and bringing irrigation to the fields through tube-wells would prove to be a tremendous hurdle. It would take a long time, many years, for new methods of agriculture to catch on. In fact, we are still bringing the Green Revolution to parts of Bangladesh and now Africa.
One of the problems we encountered was that local power structures in rural areas were exploitative, cruel and corrupt, with moneylenders, landlords and local elites often taking advantage of the landless poor in collusion with the local police and government officials. As a result, although they worked hard to survive, the work of the poorest gained little traction in terms of improving their living conditions.
I began to see the difficulty of breaking down the fatalism that held sway in rural areas. If hunger is a cage, and poverty is powerlessness, it was in part because landless people were locked out of these local power structures. They were constantly in debt to moneylenders, earning the lowest of pay for manual labour. Women in particular, often married off at the age of 13 to one of those landless labourers, bore the brunt of oppression.
Although many of our initial efforts fell short, we found our dialogue sessions were successful in building people's self-worth and solidarity. We wanted to empower the poor, to equip them with the tools they needed to break free from these constraints. One of these tools was the confidence and self-esteem to know that their actions really mattered. If we could create the conditions for people to improve their lives through their own agency and action, and they could see meaningful progress, I knew they would do the hard work of ending poverty themselves.
We began thinking about what we could do to create those conditions. We introduced group-based microcredit without collateral, allowing people to borrow and invest in new seeds, fertilizer, and farming technologies without the high rates charged by moneylenders. We introduced homestead vegetable gardens, financed by micro-loans, to add nutrients to people's diets. Later, we began introducing entirely new crops, such as maize, which was linked to a poultry industry centered on female farmers. We built value chains for other industries, such as dairy, to benefit women who owned milk cows.
Today, I am pleased to say that Bangladesh has achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Though our population has gone up 2.2 times since independence, our food production has gone up 3.1 times. This has happened through widespread irrigation during the dry seasons, the introduction of improved varieties, more effective usage of fertilizer, and other changes to farming practices. This process continues and we have seen many of these interventions, adapted to local contexts, having profound impacts on hunger and food security in other parts of Asia and in Africa.
But the underlying causes of hunger cannot be addressed through food security alone. Without clean water, basic healthcare, family planning services, and quality education for children, families remain trapped in the cycle of poverty.
I saw that we would never bring down the fertility rate without bringing down the high mortality of children in our society. The problem was not merely that family planning services were unavailable, although that was part of it. The Government, to its credit, actually began offering free family planning services, but few were accessing them. In our own intervention areas, we succeeded in raising contraceptive usage rates from single digits to about 20 per cent in the late 1970s. But we seemed to hit a ceiling there.
After listening to rural women’s concerns, I learned why. Many were actively choosing to have more children because they had so little confidence these children would actually live to adulthood. As I mentioned, at the time of independence, one in four Bangladeshi children didn't even make it to their 5th birthday, one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world. The toll in grief and human suffering was incalculable and, moreover, it was keeping generation after generation locked in a cycle of misery.
At the start of the 1980s, we launched a ten-year effort to teach mothers -- 13 million in all -- how to administer oral rehydration fluid to children with deadly diarrhea, one of the biggest killers of children. Many people, including trusted friends and colleagues, were skeptical that a relatively little known NGO, which had not even begun to work at a national level until then, would be able to reach so many people and catalyse such widespread behavioral change. But this program helped to reduce the rate of child deaths from diarrhea by 80 per cent. Together with the government, we also established a national immunisation program that took the country from 4 per cent immunisation coverage in 1986 to 72 per cent in 1990.
As a result, people gained confidence that their children would survive and accepted the benefits of having smaller families. Meanwhile, we began training village women to serve as community health workers, providing health products and services (including contraception) to their neighbors. We now have more than 100,000 community health promoters providing these services.
I believe this empowering combination of children's, maternal and reproductive health services, delivered on a local level at a massive scale, helped catalyse one of the steepest declines in fertility rates the world has ever seen.
With the child mortality rate falling dramatically, so many more children would now survive into adulthood. People rightly began to ask: Why are we teaching literacy to adults only? If we are interested in long-term development, wouldn't it be better to start with children? The Government's own schools were out of the reach of many poor families due mainly to cost and distance and, in any case, provided a poor-quality education to the few that could afford it.
Starting in the mid-1980s, we began training housewives, many of whom had only high school level education themselves, to work as schoolteachers in their own villages. In one-room schools, with majority girls in the classroom, we targeted exclusively the children from the poorest families. Many have compared these schools to the prairie schools of the American frontier, and indeed we were, in a sense, on a frontier of our own, working in villages not yet reached by the government school system.
For these village schools and teachers, we applied the same principle of empowerment and scale used in our health and family planning programs, that is, empowering people on a local level to take care of their own needs. An entire generation -- more than 11 million children -- have now come through BRAC schools. Remarkably, perhaps because of the value we place on encouraging critical thinking as opposed to rote learning, multiple studies have shown that these children perform better in standardized tests than children from more privileged backgrounds.
To be sure, none of these things caught on like wildfire. As I mentioned, it took many years, decades in some cases, to see the true impact of our work. But, for individuals, the knowledge of being in charge of their own destiny was like a light being turned on -- the light of hope.
In his Nobel speech, Norman Borlaug spoke of the historical precariousness of man's existence. Throughout most of history, humans have lived an uncertain existence, never secure in the knowledge that we would have enough to eat. He also suggested that perhaps the term "Green Revolution" was still "too premature, too optimistic, or too broad in scope." The temporary success of the Green Revolution had only given humankind a "breathing space" to solve more deep-rooted problems like overpopulation, he said.
I believe we are still within that breathing space created by the Green Revolution, and its true potential has yet to emerge. We have a great set of challenges before us. The problem of hunger still looms, for instance. It has been said that, to feed the world, we will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than we have in the last 10,000. This may sound daunting, but I am confident that, even with the challenge of ongoing climate change added to the equation, we can do it provided a new generation of Norman Borlaugs emerges.
Defeating hunger does not depend only on the science of food production. It requires us to address the problem of powerlessness among the poor -- of putting an end to that feeling, articulated so many decades ago by the villagers in Bangladesh, and still felt by so many millions today, of being locked in a cage.
As Amartya Sen has written, poverty cannot be reduced to a single factor, such as insufficient income or the lack of healthy meals. It is, at heart, a deprivation on one's capacity to be fully human -- to be able to lead a life that one has good reason to find meaningful or valuable.
I believe that the true promise of the Green Revolution means breaking free from hunger and fatalism, and that it is part of the ongoing process of becoming fully human -- making people shapers of their own destiny, able to build their futures instead of holding out their hands in supplication, and to lead lives filled with meaning and purpose, transforming the world around them.
Thank you."
- Sir Fazle Hasan Abed KCMG
World Food Prize Laureate Address
Borlaug Dialogue Symposium
Des Moines, Iowa
16 October 2015
"Thank you, Ambassador Quinn, World Food Prize Laureates, distinguished guests and friends. It is appropriate that we are gathered in Iowa in October, in the middle of the harvesting season. Throughout this month, combines are rolling across the fields, here in one of the world's largest corn-producing regions.
In my native Bangladesh, where the main crop is rice, October, in the northwest of the country, has long been a time of chronic food shortage known as monga (M-O-N-G-A). Lasting about 60 days, monga is often referred to as a "season," as though it were a natural phenomenon, like the American autumn or the Asian monsoon. But it is a season defined only by widespread unemployment and hunger among the landless. It was long assumed to be a part of the enduring fabric of rural life in northwest Bangladesh. But today, we are starting to see the disappearance of monga and, in many places it has gone completely.
How has this happened? The answer is through the gradual adoption of new technology and a change in cropping patterns. We began working with farmers to alter the cropping pattern in a way that provides year-round employment to landless labourers. We did this by introducing a shorter-maturity rice variety for the summer rainy reason. A larger gap thus opened up between the two annual rice crops, long enough to allow cultivation of a third crop: the potato. Planting and harvesting potatoes during this period provides an extra 65 person-days of employment per hectare. Land that once yielded two harvests now produces three, and as a result, the monga season is close to disappearing.
We have thus succeeded in disrupting a pattern of suffering that had prevailed for centuries.
We can count many examples of methods that enable the poor to end poverty in their own lives, putting an end to cycles of suffering like the one I have just described.
One of these enabling tools is microfinance. BRAC began offering loans and savings services to the rural poor in 1974, when we were working in just one remote area of Bangladesh.
Wage employment was low, so we wanted participants in our development programs to have their own sources of income. We started making small loans to buy cows, seeds, farm tools, and other productive assets. These were offered as part of a package of services that included literacy and empowerment training, health care, sanitation, hygiene, and family planning.
Many of the women we worked with had a hand-to-mouth existence. They could only dream of having, say, 5,000 Bangladeshi taka, or about $100, to buy a cow. We created borrower groups in each village, thus removing two of the biggest constraints on poor people's ability to take control of their lives: a lack of resources, and a lack of solidarity among themselves.
Yet our borrowers faced many more problems trying to generate income from assets bought with micro-loans.
In 1991, I remember visiting a village in the north of Bangladesh that was about two miles on foot from the main road.
I spoke to a woman there, one of our microfinance borrowers, who was selling milk from the cow she had bought with her 5,000 taka loan. She told me the cow produced two liters of milk every day which she sold for 7 taka (about 15 cents) per liter.
She said, "I'm using that money to pay the loan back and, after that, I have no income."
I knew at the time that the price of milk in the capital, Dhaka, was 25 taka per liter. The demand for milk in our growing cities was enormous, and yet this woman had no way of accessing that market.
I thought, if we could collect milk from this woman, refrigerate it, and transport it to Dhaka, we could easily pay her 15 taka per liter -- roughly twice what she was getting at that time -- and still cover our costs.
This led to the establishment of the BRAC Dairy enterprise.
In order to improve services to livestock farmers, we have trained 400 paravets -- and set up a bull station to provide artificial insemination services, with bull semen from Friesian and others high-milk producing cattle. This is now being distributed through 3,000 trained inseminators throughout the country, equipped with a cell phone and a motorcycle, to provide artificial insemination services directly to farmers' home.
Bangladesh milk production is one a growth trajectory due to these services.
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As the years went by, I found many examples like this where microcredit alone was not enough to boost incomes significantly. To help borrowers become more productive, we invested in training, inputs, and ways to get their goods to market.
We also encouraged people to develop multiple streams of income. We urged people to diversify, starting with small vegetable gardens alongside their homesteads. These supplemented their income and added nutrition to their diets. Many of our borrowers who produced vegetables for the market didn't have access to quality seeds so, in 1986, we launched our own vegetable seed production business and began producing high-quality seeds with the help of outside experts.
By the 1990s, microfinance in Bangladesh had grown quite large, driven by organizations like BRAC and Grameen Bank. Many clients were now using their micro-loans to buy and raise imported high-yielding varieties of chickens, which produced more eggs than regular domestic chickens. Over a two-year period, we trained 40,000 women in as many villages as poultry vaccinators, so they could provide provide regular vaccinations, using vaccines provided by the government, to the poultry rearers in their village.
Again, we faced constraints. This time it was a scarcity of quality poultry feed. In 1994, we began introducing hybrid maize seeds imported from Australia, so our farmers could grow maize for poultry feed.
It was quite a struggle to get Bangladeshi farmers to accept this idea. Maize was a new crop at the time and farmers weren't aware of the demand. So we offered them a buy-back guarantee. We told them, "If you grow our hybrid maize and can't sell it on the open market, we'll buy your harvest at a guaranteed price. You have no obligation to sell it to us; if you can find a buyer willing to pay more, by all means do so."
Farmers took us up on the offer, and the increased production of maize for poultry feed greatly benefited our poultry farmers. Maize is now an established crop in Bangladesh.
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In 1998, our seed enterprise entered the market for our country's dominant crop, rice. We started importing hybrid rice seeds from China and field testing them for viability in different ecological zones. We now markets 12 varieties of hybrid rice in Bangladesh, including four developed at our own research center. This seed enterprise now generates a surplus of $1 million annually -- one of many similar enterprises that support our borrowers.
We are now working in five countries in sub-Saharan Africa, using self-employed local agents to extend similar solutions to farmers there.
There are those who say a nonprofit like BRAC should follow a purely charitable model rather than generating its own income, but I reject this. Today BRAC's social enterprises, including microfinance, generate revenue in excess of $600 million, with a net surplus of $150 million. Together with substantial donor funding, this funds our schools; our programs on maternal, neo-natal and child health and nutrition; water, sanitation and hygiene; human rights training and legal services; and many other programs.
Microfinance became one of our largest and most successful programs. But by the late 1990s, our field research showed that we still weren't reaching the poorest 10 per cent of Bangladesh's population. Even after 25 years of building rural livelihoods, we were failing to provide any significant opportunities to those most in need.
Millions of households at the very bottom were being systematically excluded from group-based microfinance. The group members, who were all poor women themselves, would not let the poorest women in the village join the groups. The members thought the poorest would not be able to regularly save and use loan capital to generate income.
We called them the “ultra-poor,” a sub-set of the extreme poor who lived on less than 80 US cents a day. They were mostly households headed by women, many of whom were widowed or abandoned.
We found the poorest do not take part in village life. Their children do not go to school. With their basic needs unmet, microfinance alone could not offer them a pathway out of poverty.
In 2001, BRAC developed a program tailored for the ultra-poor. We sought to address their multiple barriers to development simultaneously, hoping to give them a boost that “graduated” them from ultra-poverty.
Selected ultra-poor families receive a package of support: a cash stipend, a productive asset (such as a cow or half a dozen goats), training, a savings accounts, and basic healthcare.
This support period lasts 24 months. During this time, we make sure their children are able to go to school, encourage them to adopt savings habits, and coach them in the basics of financial management. Our staff pays regular visits to their homes for coaching and handholding to help them through any problems they may encounter. We involve others to get them into the mainstream life of the village.
The change that takes place in these women over these 24 months is remarkable. They begin to emerge from the darkness of poverty and hopelessness. It is as though a light has been switched on, and their lives begin to change in ways that far exceed what we put into the program. After years of suffering, it seems their hard work is finally gaining traction.
Since 2002, 95 percent of the 1.4 million families who have come through this program have graduated from ultra-poverty -- a 95 per cent graduation rate! -- and independent studies conducted by London School of Economics show that, even four years after members graduate, they continue to experience growth in their household income and improved well-being.
Success is not limited to Bangladesh. In May, Science magazine published the results of a large randomised control trial, conducted by researchers at Yale and MIT, covering pilots of similar graduation programs, based on BRAC's model but run by other NGOs in India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, and Peru. The results showed definitive success. In all six of the countries studied, treatment households saw significant improvements across a range of indicators that continued beyond the end of their programs.
So these graduation programs seem to work in all cultures -- not just Bangladesh.
I have compared people's realisation of their own power to change the world around them to a light being turned on -- the light of hope. It is a light that all people have within them, even those who may seem lost in darkness.
Time and again, we find examples like these, where poor people are able to harness their own energy and change their own lives, once we create the enabling conditions for them to do so.
To break the inter-generational cycle of poverty, BRAC opened its first schools for the children of the poor in 1985. One of our main objectives was to ensure quality, because these children, deprived of home learning opportunities, needed the best education they could get.
I remember reading an article in the Times Education Supplement about where the best teaching was taking place. It said that the Dutch were the best and language and maths, and the New Zealanders were best at mother language teaching. So we paid a visit to the New Zealand High Commissioner in Delhi, who happened to be Sir Edmund Hillary. I asked if he could help us find some of the top educators in New Zealand to help us improve our mother-tongue language teaching. "Sure," he said. "I can find somebody to help you."
So we recruited teachers from New Zealand, the Netherlands and elsewhere to help our team develop our curriculum, materials and teaching methods, with a view toward provide the highest-quality education we could to the poor.
*
To find good teachers, we didn't go to teachers' colleges, but looked within the community for a housewife with a high school education. These women received an initial induction training of two weeks, followed by classroom supervision twice a week and monthly refresher training. This developed them, over time, into excellent schoolteachers for the children of the village. And these teachers would be role models for local girls, who form the majority in our classrooms.
By ensuring quality, we soon found that students from BRAC schools were outperforming those from government schools. We are now operating 60,000 one-teacher schools in Bangladesh and other countries in Asia and Africa. We have been able to provide high-quality schooling to an entire generation – approximately 11 million graduates from the primary and pre-primary levels – who would have otherwise remained illiterate.
I would end by reflecting on remarks made by Norman Borlaug in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when the Green Revolution was still in its early days. Despite the spectacular gains in wheat production that had been seen in India, West Pakistan and the Philippines, Borlaug said the Green Revolution was not yet a victory but merely "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation." It had granted us a breathing space, he said, in which we had a chance to solve larger problems.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that today we are still within that breathing space created by the Green Revolution. We now have a historic opportunity to end extreme poverty and hunger within our lifetimes. The Sustainable Development Goals set a target of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030, and I believe it is within our power to do so.
We have called into question the fatalistic belief, prevalent throughout history, that widespread human misery is an immutable part of nature. We understand, finally, that things once considered an inevitable aspect of the human experience, often thought to be ordained by a higher power -- things like hunger, poverty, seasonal famine, the oppression of women, and the marginalisation of great portions of society -- are in fact changeable through the power of human activity. And we understand that even the poorest among us can be the agents of this change.
Let us therefore make good use of the breathing space of the Green Revolution to disrupt these cycles of suffering forever.
Thank you."
- Sir Fazle Hasan Abed KCMG
Fifth year in a row
The Financial Reporting (FiRe) award was held in Kampala on 19 November 2015. At the event, BRAC Uganda was awarded the certificate of recognition for outstanding achievement in the general sub-category and named the winner in the non-governmental organisation category.
The award was received by BRAC Uganda’s country representative, country head of accounts and accounts manager. This is the fifth consecutive year when BRAC Uganda has won an award at an event organised by Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Uganda.
Debating for the right cause
30 August, 2015
The finale of BRAC Uganda’s Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) programme debate competition was held in Metropole hotel in Kampala on 25 August 2015. ELA uses debate as a technique to engage girls in critical thinking and problem solving in their communities.
At the beginning of the year, under the ELA programme, debate trainings were conducted where 8,310 girls competed within their clubs. From this, 1,385 girls went on to compete at the branch level, of which 282 proceeded to the area level. Eventually 21 girls made it to the regional level in which they were put in groups of three, each representing the seven regions in which ELA operates.
The two winning teams - Gulu region and Kampala-I region competed at the national level ELA debate tournament held at Kampala. With youth unemployment being a crucial factor affecting Uganda’s development, the topic of the debate was, ‘lack of skills is the main barrier to employment’.
Kyateka Mondo, the Assistant Commissioner for Youth in the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) was present at the event on behalf of Minister Muruli Mukasa. He handed over the trophies, medals and prizes to the winners – Gulu region - and the runner-up team. High officials and staff members from BRAC Uganda, officials from the MGLSD, members of BRAC Uganda Advisory Board, representatives from UNICEF, UNFPA, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Makerere University and other organisations were present at the event.
Bangladesh achieves the highest level of breastfeeding and the greatest increase in complementary feeding
26 August 2015, Dhaka. Interpersonal contact between healthcare workers and mothers have produced a large scale improvement in infant and young child feeding programme and in hand washing habits, said speakers at a seminar yesterday.
Referring to a baseline and an endline survey conducted in 2010 and 2014 respectively in 50 sub-districts where community-based Alive & Thrive programme was implemented by BRAC, they said exclusive breastfeeding went up to 88 per cent from 48, and the percentage of mothers washing hands before feeding young children improved from 23 per cent to 31.
They were addressing a dissemination seminar on Alive & Thrive programme, lessons learned and evaluation results on infant and young children feeding practices in Bangladesh, held at BRAC Centre Inn in the capital.
The Bangladesh part of the project had been implemented by BRAC from 2009 to 2014 with a strong emphasis on community engagement by using its existing healthcare platforms and a cadre of frontline community health workers.
"People in Bangladesh are very receptive," said Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury, speaker in parliament, at the programme.
The chair of the event, BRAC’s executive director Dr Muhammad Musa noted that nutrition interventions are difficult to implement and the high success rate of Bangladesh proves the strength of BRAC’s engagement with the community.
Ellen Piwoz, senior programme officer on nutrition at the Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program, said: “We are looking forward to working in Bangladesh with government, BRAC, and all the partners in future with our new strategy.” She also added that the project on improving infant and young child feeding practices funded in three countries was the “most successful” in Bangladesh.
Launched in 2009 in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia with funding from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Canadian and Irish governments, Alive & Thrive used advocacy, interpersonal communication and community mobilisation, mass media and strategic data to improve breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices and to reduce stunting and anaemia in young children.
Besides, BRAC and other international development organisations joined the initiative under the management of FHI 360, a US-based organisation.
Dr Tina Sanghvi, country programme director and senior technical advisor, Alive & Thrive said Bangladesh's improvement in breastfeeding was better than Vietnam and Ethiopia where the exclusive breastfeeding increased from 19 percent to 58 and 72 percent to 83 respectively.
Complementary feeding with diet diversity increased in Bangladesh from 32 per cent to 64, she said.
BRAC commits to protest violence and sexual harassment against women and girls every month
27 August 2015, Dhaka. On 14 April 2015 during the pohela boishakh celebrations around 20 women and girls were sexually abused in Dhaka University's TSC and Suhrawardy Udyan gate areas. Similar kind of incidents took place in different parts of the country on the same day, stirring the entire nation. Practices like child marriage, dowry and violence against women and girls are issues that Bangladesh continues to struggle with.
A national survey carried out by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in 2011, shows that as many as 87 per cent of married women reported having experienced both physical and psychological violence in the last 12 months.
BRAC expressed its stand against such incidents of violence and harassment and decided to organise a nationwide human chain, BRAC bondhon on every last Thursday of the month for 15 minutes starting from May 2015 until December 2015. People from other sectors and organisations, including onlookers, are also expressing solidarity by joining the BRAC bondhon. So far BRAC has organised four human chains with participation from 70,000 BRAC staff and BRAC’s affiliated community members including government officials, community leaders, parents, students, teachers in all of 64 districts, and in an average of 2,326 spots around the country.
BRAC has been working to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality since its inception. The organisation takes an active stand against harassment and sexual violence on women and children.
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