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Isabel Whisson

Isabel has worked across BRAC and BRAC International for nearly a decade, with a focus on financial inclusion, ultra-poor graduation, and more recently, climate resilience. Her work at BRAC has taken her from capturing financial innovations in Bangladesh and post-epidemic resilience in West Africa, to guiding multilateral and government policy change on extreme poverty reduction in countries in Asia and Africa. She was an architect of the Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative's "audacious" strategy. Isabel has a Masters in International Public Policy from University College London.

September 2, 2014

How millions of women like Chobi are beating ultra poverty

“When it would rain, we did not have a dry area to sleep… I used old and torn rags to cover my children.” The video speaks for itself. A self-told story about how Chobi Rani, with the assistance of BRAC, brought herself out of the harshest forms of poverty, to feed and send her children to school, live in a comfortable home and maintain successful enterprises in farming.
July 9, 2014

Inclusive microfinance – putting the ‘ability’ into ‘disability’

On  24 June, 2014, BRAC welcomed Joshua Goldstein from the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion, to Bangladesh. Josh, a key figure in the campaign for disability-inclusive development, is helping to galvanise a worldwide movement that takes financial inclusion that necessary step further- including persons with disabilities. Naturally - connecting with the world’s largest NGO seemed like a great place to start.
June 11, 2014

‘Programme’ versus ‘program’

With a workforce of 135,000 – many of whom are non-native English speakers – BRAC faces significant challenges in delivering consistent and standardised English language communications material. BRAC Communications is therefore making a concerted effort to equip its huge body of staff with the linguistic tools and training to communicate clearly and effectively in English to its internal and external stakeholders.