New York Times columnist, David Brooks, writes about Afghanistan

New York Times columnist, David Brooks, has just returned from a trip to Afghanistan. In his recent columns he writes about the perils of the social fragmentation, fractured village structure and decimated social capital that have resulted from decades of war.

(“Combat and Community” 03/23/09, “The Winnable War” 03/26/09).

BRAC has successfully been working to combat these issues in Afghanistan since it launched programs there in 2002. BRAC’s microfinance and other programs are designed to build community, and are delivered through organizing women into village organizations. BRAC organizes the most vulnerable, particularly poor women, for their own self-empowerment, rights, protection, work and collective voice. It helps them build social capital.

Today BRAC Afghanistan is the largest development organization and provider of microfinance in the country, with programs in 23 of the country’s 34 provinces. Here are just a few of our accomplishments to date:

– Benefited a total of 895,000 people
– Disbursed $96 million in microloans to 143,097 borrowers
– Provided health services to 3.5 million individuals
– Graduated 118,416 students from primary schools (94% girls)
– Recruited and trained 1,500 model farmers and 1,300 poultry and livestock workers

BRAC Afghanistan Staff with Susan Davis, President of BRAC USA

Brooks touches on the struggles of many Western aid organizations in the region. One of the keys to BRAC’s success is that 95% of the 3,887 BRAC Afghanistan Staff are Afghani which enables us to bring the BRAC experience to a local level.

The forthcoming book about BRAC, Freedom From Want, by Ian Smillie dedicates a chapter (Chapter 19) to how BRAC’s holistic and community based approach to development has allowed it to thrive in Afghanistan, in the face of many challenges. Click here to pre-order your copy of Freedom From Want

BRAC’s Community Based School program, located in 11 different provinces, provides educational opportunities to out-of-school girls and is another example of how BRAC uses it’s programs to build community. Community members are intimately involved in site selection for these community-based schools. Schools are managed by a committee comprised of a local teacher, leaders from the community, a female representative of the parents and an educational patron.Monthly mothers forums allow for open discussion about students’ performance and education.Additionally, BRAC is working on an adolescent development program which addresses the inequalities that adolescent girls face in response to subordination, early marriage, frequent pregnancy, abandonment, divorce, domestic violence, marginalization and exclusion through financial and social interventions.