BRAC wrapped up the second Frugal Innovation Forum amid much excitement about the possibility for new ideas and partnerships. Over 150 people representing 16 countries spent their weekend at BRAC’s scenic conference centre in Savar, learning from each other, sharing traffic jam-induced epiphanies, and bonding over tea, cricket and karaoke.
Yesterday, November 19, 2013, BRAC USA President Susan Davis attended the World Toilet Day events at the United Nations headquarters along with the head of BRAC’s Disaster, Environment, and Climate program, Tanzeba Ambereen Huq. Ms. Huq delivered remarks regarding BRAC’s Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene program (WASH).
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.
Many mapping initiatives are ramping up in the developing world, but in urban megacities like Dhaka, the slums remain largely uncharted–even by mapping giants like Google.
One of the core strategies of the BRAC Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Programme in Bangladesh is to put special emphasis on involving rural women in decision-making processes, alongside efforts to improve menstrual hygiene and access to water and sanitation.
Variously called targeting the ultra-poor, just TUP, or more famously the graduation program (which we’re not always sure is the right title), BRAC’s work with the ultra-poor is officially titled Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction – Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR-TUP). A mouthful yes, but not nearly as many mouthfuls as there have been recently about the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of a core component in the program: livelihoods training.
It can seem so easy. Give a slum-dweller a three-wheeled vehicle. She creates a mobile tea business. Income increases from 100 Bangladeshi taka to 400 taka per day. She leaves her backbreaking job as a brick-maker, quadruples her income, preserves her health, restores her dignity. Rinse, repeat.
The auditorium was full, the anticipation palpable, and the speaker keenly waiting to talk about his mentor in front of an enthusiast audience – that’s how the mid-morning of the Hartal day looked like for us at BRAC yesterday. Dr. Laurence Simon1 presented a seminar on ‘Paulo Freire and the Subaltern Consciousness’ at the BRAC Centre on the 5th of February.
A group of men and women attend a participatory wealth ranking in Kaposhatia in Pakchanda union in Hossanipur upazila, Bangladesh.(Credit: BRAC/Shehzad Noorani).
“Where are the poor?” asks my colleague Oscar Abello at NextBillion.net, in an article that explains why better targeting of aid and impact investing programs has never been more essential. This is particularly true when it comes to “ultra-poor programs” that have been so successful in addressing the direst forms of extreme poverty.
A recent global meeting in Paris acted as the first occasion for sharing the first tranche of substantive results from 10 pilot programs implemented across 8 countries around the world based on BRAC’s flagship program for reaching the ultra poor – Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra Poor, otherwise shortened to CFPR:TUP.
Some of you may have read the first of these two back-to-back posts recounting my first field visit since taking up what must be officially the world’s most cumbersome job title – Knowledge Management & Strategic Communications Specialist – at BRAC. People have been asking for my card over the past month, as you do.
The pervasive torrential rains in the Bandarban, Cox’s Bazar, Sylhet, Chittagong, & Feni district of Bangladesh have left a significant number of people homeless and distressed in the past one week. Roads and railways communication network are left in devastating conditions which has made any kind of aid or assistance impossible to reach. Under such circumstances, BRAC’s Disaster, Management and Climate Change (DMCC) programme has geared up to challenge the extremes and reach out to those in dire need.