BRAC celebrates World Toilet Day 2013

Watch this short video and learn how you can help support universal access to better sanitation and improved personal hygiene through the work of the poor themselves!

Making childbirth safer in the big city

GlaxoSmithKline and Save the Children have joined together to create a $1 million Healthcare Innovation Award, awarding $300,000 to BRAC. The funds will be used to pilot BRAC’s Manoshi program in Freetown, Sierra Leone, after having tremendous success in the urban slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The role of WASH in scaling up nutrition in Bangladesh

The 2011 Lancet series says that about 2.6 billion people lack access to proper toilet facilities and about 980 million young people under 18 live in homes without basic sanitation. Moreover, research has shown that unimproved hygiene, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient and unsafe drinking water account for about seven per cent of the total disease burden and 19 per cent of child mortality worldwide.

The hidden dimensions of scale

When assessing pilots, people often talk about a program or organization’s potential to scale. Certainly there are factors that make some models easier to scale than others. At BRAC, the world’s largest nonprofit organization, there is a relentless focus on making models that are not only effective, but also efficient and scalable. But our current research initiative, called the Doing While Learning: Collaborative Models for Scaling Innovation project, is revealing the importance of factors beyond the model, such as organizational capabilities and social capital in the pilot’s environment.

Innovation ecosystem in South Asia: A new interactive map

We live in an innovation obsessed world. Organisations across sectors have made innovating an explicit priority. Many are devising deliberate strategies to foster innovation. In 2012, BRAC, the world’s largest NGO, developed the Social Innovation Lab for this purpose. We step out from the researcher’s cubicle and explore innovations happening on the frontlines.

Why do we do good?

There’s never been so many ways for so many people to come together and do some good. But why do we do good and how can we be sure the changes we seek are meaningful and lasting?

Tilling the Tanzanian soil for development

How can we quickly boost farmer incomes so they have a chance to lift theLike 80 percent of Tanzanians, she earns a living from agriculture. The smile on Khabitu’s face suggests she’s doing well. She works as a model farmer, demonstrating good techniques to her neighbors at her small vegetable farm, which she tends with her husband Said, in Iringu, central Tanzania.mselves out of poverty?

Comparing branchless banking in Bangladesh and Pakistan

Bangladesh is a recent entrant into branchless banking – deployments only began in earnest in the middle of 2011. CGAP reviewed the first year of branchless banking (referred to as “mobile financial services” in Bangladesh) together with Bangladesh Bank up to March 2012.

Change from the very, very bottom-up

In 2006, Rasheda Sahab’s husband passed away from kidney failure, leaving her with four children and no money. Today’s she’s a thriving sanitation entrepreneur. Here’s her story.

Want to change the world? Apply to be one of Teach for Bangladesh’s first fellows

My former roommate, Nina, was a Teach for America fellow in the South Side of Chicago. Dropouts, teenage pregnancies, drugs, violence–she had plenty of stories about her students along these lines. But she had another one that was tragic in another way that stays in my mind: one of her students had been incredible bright, resourceful, committed.

Frugal Innovation Forum—DAY 1

Day 1 of our Frugal Innovation Forum sought out best practices from diverse organizations—from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan to Myanmar and Sri Lanka—grounded in developing human capital, organizing communities, and engaging civic action. While common rhetoric around innovation tends to stress technology advances, Asif Saleh, BRAC’s Senior Director, Strategy, Communications, and Capacity, stressed that “this innovation is not about products, but is a constant process in the organization focused on impact.”

Youth building a world of savers, peer-by-peer

“The global financial crisis has turned us into a world of savers,” The Washington Post reported recently. “Including the poorest among us.” Of course people all throughout history, in every culture, have found ways to store away money for a rainy day. The difference today is the growing access to more organized, safer ways to save money. Access is not the same as adoption, however. For the poor to adopt new savings tools, requires, as the story notes, “building the trust of the poor, penny by penny,” which can be very slow. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that