As per the estimation by the World Health Organization, over 21,000 deaths occurred from road crashes in Bangladesh in 2015 with road traffic crashes equating to an estimated 1.6 per cent loss to the nation's GDP. The number of reported traffic fatalities per 100,000 population was 2.1048 in Bangladesh in 2013 (with 3,296 reported traffic fatalities and a population of 156,594,962). Furthermore, most affected families are driven into poverty from the loss of a family member who was a source of earning. BRAC's road safety programme identified key areas in Bangladesh where communities are exposed to risk of road accidents. These communities live very close to or beside the major highways. As part of engaging the communities, the programme activated several campaigns to raise awareness and help develop a sense of ownership of its own road safety.

Community road safety
In 2000, the government of Bangladesh requested BRAC to complement its efforts to improve road safety in the country. In 2001, BRAC decided to fullfill this request, both for the sake of the country and to protect its staff and programme participants. We chose to build road safety awareness, partly because of the insufficiency of road safety education in the formal education curriculum and the provision of information being passed along via word of mouth. Our approach was to involve the local communities, build their road safety capacity and road safety ownership, because our organisational experience has taught us that local ownership of development initiatives is crucial for achieving the desired outcome. As community road safety education is relatively new in the world - especially in developing countries, BRAC is a pioneer in community road safety initiatives in Bangladesh.
 


In 2003 BRAC was approached by UK’s Transport research laboratory (TRL) to carry out an action research project in community road safety education. By consulting local communities on their road safety problems, causes, solutions, preferred methods and messages for builing awareness, we designed a community road safety programme. The pilot project was done in partnership with TRLat Betila, and the project was very successful in making pedestrians aware of safe walking and crossing rules. This was the genesis of BRAC's road community road safety initiative and since then, (in consultation with local communities) BRAC has been improving the programme and have created new components while customising it to the needs of the particular communities.

Read more.

BRAC Driving School
The road safety related skills and attitude of drivers are huge factors determining public safety on roads. BRAC Driving School was started because there was a lack of good training facilities for in-service drivers, driving instructors, and novice drivers.



BRAC Driving School, a modern driving school in Bangladesh, was launched in 2012 by BRAC’s road safety programme. Earlier in 2011, in a meeting of the National Road Safety Council (NRSC),  a decision was made that BRAC will take up a driving training project to train driving instructors and provide road safety training to in-service drivers considering the dismal state of drivers training in the country. After that, BRAC with the technical support of Hubert Ebner (India) Pvt Ltd prepared training materials and conducted the training of trainers (TOT).

Read more.

Advocacy: Promoting Safe Road Code project

Together with BRAC's advocacy for social change programme, the road safety programme has also worked on an advocacy project called 'Promoting Safe Road Code’. In this three year project (2013 – 2015) it was proposed that a safe road code would be drafted in consultation with relevant stakeholders and experts to be promoted afterwards. This code would describe important rules and regulations which should be followed by all road users. However, during the project the government of Bangladesh designed and considered new traffic laws (RTA), after which the safe road code was held redundant by BRAC. As a result, instead of the safe road code, the great importance of road safety in general was promoted. BRAC also organised some national level discussions to improve the proposed road traffic act (RTA). Another major activity was conducting a research on road safety carried out by Power and Participation Research Center (PPRC). A higher goal of the project was to create an enabling environment for the road safety programme. As communities, local and national policy makers, other authorities, and service providers such as the BRTA have been sensitised on and mobilised for road safety, future activities of the road safety programme can receive more support.

BRAC mourns the sad demise of Dr Babar Kabir who was the former senior director of BRAC's disaster management and climate change and water, sanitation and hygiene programmes. On the morning of 15 January at around 7 am, after a severe asthma attack, he succumbed to a cardiac arrest in Dhaka. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Dr Kabir completed his PhD in hydrogeology in 1986 from Azerbaijan State University and has been working in the field of environment and public health since then. He has served in the capacity of senior management roles at the World Bank-WSP, UNDP Bangladesh, Ministry of Environment and Forest, Government of Bangladesh as national programme coordinator for their Sustainable Environment Management Programme (SEMP), and other multilateral and bilateral organisations. In 2007, Dr Kabir joined BRAC as director of its water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and disaster management and climate change (DMCC) programmes, and in 2012 he became a senior director. He was also a member of the Executive Management Committee, which is BRAC’s management decision making committee.

Hinged on his leadership, BRAC provided more than 37 million people with hygienic sanitation and another two million with access to safe water in 250 sub-districts of Bangladesh. And in 2013, after the Rana Plaza disaster, BRAC reached out to number of survivors through health protection scheme, fixed deposit, skills development training for different livelihood followed by seed funding as investment to begin new life and psychosocial counselling to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 2014, Dr Kabir left BRAC to become a consultant in the WASH and microfinance sectors. He has over 15 publications in national and international journals and has co-authored a chapter on ‘Mitigation Strategies’ of the WHO monograph on arsenic initiated by UNACC.

Today, the BRAC family is deeply saddened by the departure of such a dynamic leader and a brilliant mind that came out of this nation.

When the non-profit BRAC was set up over 40 years ago, it was a temporary effort aimed at helping rural populations that had been affected by a devastating cyclone and civil war. Today, BRAC is one of the biggest NGOs in the world, and responsible for lifting 150 million people out of poverty. Farming First TV had the opportunity to interview BRAC’s Founder, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed at the Borlaug Dialogue in Iowa, where he was honoured as the 2015 World Food Prize Laureate, to find out the secrets of success behind the Bangladesh-based NGO. 

 For centuries, Bangladeshi farmers had faced a hunger season, known as monga. Sir Fazle told Farming First how giving farmers access to rice varieties that matured more quickly allowed a third crop, potatoes, to be planted in between the two rice growing seasons. “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,” he commented.

“We have…succeeded in disrupting a pattern of suffering that had prevailed for centuries”

Providing farmers with finance and access to markets in order to sell their produce, was a second strand of activity that BRAC undertook in order to help rural people prosper. Sir Fazle told us how he had seen that farmers in rural areas were not getting a fair price for their milk.

“I thought, if we could collect milk… refrigerate it, and transport it to Dhaka, we could easily pay (the farmer) 15 taka per litre — roughly twice what she was getting at that time — and still cover our costs. This led to the establishment of the BRAC Dairy enterprise.”

BRAC now operates several social enterprises, that are all focussed on providing high quality inputs and services for the poor. These businesses generate $150 million in profit each year, which is all directed into financing BRAC’s non-for profit work such as healthcare and education.

For more information on Sir Fazle Hasan Abed and BRAC’s work, visit the World Food Prizewebsite.

BRAC awarded 10 journalists from local and national media at an event in the capital today. BRAC Migration programme organised this event at BRAC Centre in recognition of media’s contribution in raising mass awareness on migration, migrant’s rights and welfare. This initiative was taken for the first time to acknowledge and encourage journalism in migration sector.

10 journalists from print, online and electronic media received the award from BRAC’s executive director Dr Muhammad Musa. A jury board of four members selected the winners on the criterion of raising public awareness, advocating for the rights, welfare and well-being of Bangladeshi migrant workers and their families. promoting a positive image of Bangladeshi migrants and creativity, originality and innovativeness of the content. The jury board members did not include any BRAC staff to maintain impartiality.

From the national print media category first, second and third positions were secured by Md Shariful Hasan of Prothom Alo, Md Abid Ajad Shuvo of Dhaka tribune, Belal Hossain Biplob of The Daily Star. The winners of local level category are Abu Bakar Siddiq (3rd) of Daily Jalalabad, Sylhet, Aftab Hossian (2nd) of Mayabazar, Rangpur;  and Mohammad Sarif Eqbal (1st) of Laal Shobujer Desh, Khoj Khabor and Daily News, Narshingdi. Md Rabiul Islam of migrationnews.bd.com received the award in the online media category.  From the electronic media category first, second and third were Salah Uddin Helali from Jamuna TV, Keramat Ullah Biplab from ATN Bangla and Jhumur Bari from 71 TV.

The keynote presentation was delivered by programme head of migration programme, Mr Hassan Imam before the award ceremony took place. Highlighting media exposure on migration he said, “Steps have been taken internationally and nationally to stop irregular migration through sea-root after substantial reporting in media.”  

Present as special guest one of the jury board members, Joint Secretary of ministry of expatriates’ welfare and overseas employment Mr Kazi Abul Kalam said, “Bangladesh Government has recently rewarded BRAC for its significant work in migration sector. A special thanks to media for its strong role in bringing out stories of migrant workers in 2015. From Government, we are setting up a hotline number with the help of A2I for the migrants all over the world. We hope we will get all cooperation from media and civil society to help migrants in future.”

Appreciating media’s role in this sector BRAC’s ED Dr Musa said, “Collective effort by civil society, media and government can create a constructive movement to ensure migrant’s rights and their wellbeing. This award is our respect to media for their constructive and substantial role to ensure safe and quality migration.”

The event was moderated by BRAC’s senior director of strategy, empowerment and capacity Mr Asif Saleh. Director of BRAC’s gender, justice and diversity and migration programme was also present along with representatives from media, civil society and development organisations.

The Government of Bangladesh has awarded BRAC Migration Programme for its outstanding contribution in migration sector in promoting migrants' rights and raising awareness on safe migration in Bangladesh.

HE Mr Khandker Mosharraf Hossain,MP, Ministry of Local Government Rural Development and Co-Operatives, HE Mr Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali, MP, Foreign Minister and HE Mr Nurul Islam BSc, Ministry of Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment, Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh has handed over the award to BRAC on 18 December 2015 on the International Migrants Day at the Bangabandhu International Conference Centre. Ms Sheepa Hafiza, director of gender justice and diversity and migration programme received the award on behalf of BRAC.

“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.”

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

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.

*

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.

*

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.

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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

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.

Bangladeshi poverty fighter Fazle Abed is the winner of the 2015 World Food Prize. (Courtesy photo)

Sometimes called the “Nobel Prize for food and agriculture,” the World Food Prize recognizes people who have made breakthrough contributions towards improving the world’s food supply. This year’s winner is a former accountant from Bangladesh.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, knighted for his work by the British crown, founded BRAC (formerly known as Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) in 1972 following Bangladesh’s devastating cyclone and war of independence.  More than 40 years later, BRAC has helped nearly 150 million people out of poverty.

Focus on women and children

Beyond supporting a range of businesses, including fish hatcheries, tea plantations and milk processing centers, Abed has made it his business to help women in rural villages. They learn modern farming techniques, such as how to efficiently apply fertilizer to crops. Abed established programs that have enabled millions to disburse more than $1 billion through microfinance organizations. The loans have allowed women to create small, sustainable businesses producing iodized salt or raising cows, along with dairy and poultry farming. 

BRAC’s innovations helped cut Bangladesh’s child mortality rate from 25 percent to 7 percent. How? Abed trained women to teach others how to mix a solution of water, salt and sugar — a combination that prevents dehydration. Instructors’ wages were based on how well households understood this lesson, in essence making this effort one of the world’s earliest incentive-based social entrepreneurship programs.

“Only by putting the poorest, and women in particular, in charge of their own destinies, will absolute poverty and deprivation be removed from the face of the earth,” Abed said after he learned of his nomination for the award. 

Take Christina John, a farmer in Dodoma district in Tanzania. As a result of the vegetable seeds and field management lessons she received from BRAC, which began operations in the large East African nation in 2006, her income increased fourfold. She now earns enough money to send her children to school.

Feeding millions

Today, BRAC operates in Bangladesh and 10 other countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, reaching an estimated 135 million people. 

“At a time when the world confronts the great challenge of feeding over 9 billion people,” said World Food Prize President Kenneth Quinn, Abed and BRAC “have created the pre-eminent model being followed around the globe on how to educate girls, empower women and lift whole generations out of poverty.”

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that “Sir Fazle’s and his organization’s recognition that engaging women in STEAM fields — science, technology, engineering, agriculture and math — benefits our local and global communities.”

The roots of the World Food Prize

The World Food Prize was conceived in 1986 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Norman Borlaug, an agronomist who grew up on a farm in Iowa. The father of the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, he crossbred thousands of wheat varieties, created “dwarf wheat” and developed a new agriculture technique that saved hundreds of millions of people from death and famine.

Recipients of the award have hailed from all over the world, including India, China, Cuba, Denmark, Sierra Leone, Brazil and Ethiopia, where Gebisa Ejeta brought drought-resistant sorghum to Africa. U.S. winners include food scientist Philip Nelson, who revolutionized bulk food transportation and storage.

Abed will receive the World Food Prize on October 15 in Des Moines, Iowa, during the Borlaug Dialogue, a three-day international symposium that attracts agriculture and development experts from more than 65 countries.