Here’s why BRAC’s partners trust them to deliver sustainable results

July 16, 2015

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Over the last forty years BRAC have been dramatically changing people’s lives in Bangladesh and more recently across the world. It is through working hand-in-hand with our partners that has made it possible to ‘reach scale’ and create opportunities for more and more people to move out of poverty.

Over the last forty years BRAC have been dramatically changing people’s lives in Bangladesh and more recently across the world. It is through working hand-in-hand with our partners that has made it possible to ‘reach scale’ and create opportunities for more and more people to move out of poverty.

Two of our biggest partners have been the UK Department for International Development (who recently enshrined 0.7 per cent of their GDP as budget for international aid) and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. For the last five years we have formed a partnership based on mutual trust and respect. We call this the ‘strategic partnership arrangement’.

At BRAC, a core value is making development effective. We want to be able to reach more people, and when we do, we want it to sufficiently create a shift in their circumstances so they can rise out of poverty. And we are very good at doing this too. Our partners have faith in us and therefore provide significant resources to ensure that we are able to continue reaching the most vulnerable communities.

The impact of this partnership has been staggering; you can see this in the infographic below. Together we graduated families out of extreme poverty, developed new varieties of hybrid crops and increased yields for farmers, made sure children go to school and pass their exams, helped thousands of adolescent girls grow their confidence, cared for mothers and their babies, taught communities about contraception, and reached millions with clean water and sanitation solutions (check out our floating toilets!).

Across all of these programmes, women and girls are a priority. For instance, 60 per cent of BRAC’s school students are girls. Women are also central to the community empowerment programme, where local development is planned and undertaken at the village level through communities’ own initiative. Because of our work, 48 per cent of households reported reduced violence against women and 43 per cent reported more balanced gender roles at the household level.

SPA Infographic (5)

At BRAC we are extremely proud of the impact that we have been able to make, but this partnership offers more than results; it is a new, unique way for development to operate – to be effective.

SPA-02-web

Photo: Simon Davis/DFID

By working together we have been able to deliver quicker progress towards the achievement of internationally agreed millennium development goals. BRAC’s targets for the partnership reflect these wider national goals and we are on course to smash a fair few of these, most notably for improving maternal and neonatal health and attaining gender parity in primary and secondary schools.

Our partners deliver flexible core funding and BRAC is given the space to innovate, iterate and be effective. There is a focus on shared goals where more money can be spent on programmes and less on administration. BRAC can focus on knowledge sharing and improving the use of evidence and results. We work together to learn from each other, moving away from a traditional donor-NGO relationship towards a more equal partnership.


Katie Allen is a communications and marketing officer at BRAC UK
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shanta islam
shanta islam
8 years ago

BRAC always helped needed peoples. I appreciate it.
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