After the mass destruction during the civil war in Sierra Leone, I had a desire to give back to my country and help in nation building. Starting off as a child activist for Search for Common Ground, I have represented the vulnerable war-affected children of Sierra Leone both nationally and internationally, ensuring that their voices are heard and attended to. Working in development was always my utmost desire.
Bangladesh is rated as one of the 36 high malnutrition burdened countries in the world. Although it was widely perceived that malnutrition could be curbed down by increasing peoples’ income, recent studies have shown that it is not always the case. Malnutrition is not only under-nutrition but also over-nutrition, which leads to obesity leading to further health complications such as non-communicable diseases. Moreover, exposure to junk food coupled with a lack of knowledge on nutrition increases the prevalence of malnutrition across the mid and higher quintile of the population.
There is a lot of optimism and speculation about how mobile money can improve the lives of the poor. For BRAC, the success of an intervention is judged not only by its impact, but whether it can be scaled nationally. In order to do that, initiatives have to be frugal—which is why frugal innovation is at the heart of BRAC’s culture. If we didn’t keep our costs low, we wouldn’t be able to impact 120 million people. With the importance of this in mind, the social innovation lab has made hosting Frugal Innovation Forums an annual event.
“People are poor because they are powerless,” says BRAC Founder and Chairperson Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. But power isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game. It takes work, but you can create it, because power comes from relationships and you can give people a safe space (or as some say a platform) to create and strengthen real world social networks they might not otherwise have time or space to build.
If you want to help spur the economy and improve people’s lives over the long term in a place like Uganda – the youngest country on earth, with a median age of 14 – then you have to talk and listen to young people like Brenda Masika. That’s one of the key lessons of BRAC’s partnership with The MasterCard Foundation, which has enabled a speedy scale-up in a country facing a massive youth bulge.
Bangladesh, Malawi and Nepal have been highlighted in a new UNICEF report as three countries on track to meet their child survival targets, incorporated in MDG 4 that aims to reduce under-5 deaths worldwide to a third of their 1990 levels by 2015.
This article was originally posted by Duncan Green in the From Poverty to Power BlogThinking Big, Going Global is a new IDS working paper on what is arguably the first fully fledged international NGO from the South. Since 2002, BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO
The following was originally posted by BRAC USA President and CEO Susan Davis on the World Education blog.With the Education for All goals and the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015 on our minds, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about measurements of educational quality, rather than a simple push for increased student enrollment in developing countries.
Somehow I managed to get from Rwanda to Zambia over the last week by a combination of boda, matatu, feet, bus, hitchhiking, and ferry, which is a subject for another entry – but now I finally have time to write a bit about how I spent most of my three weeks in Uganda.
The world’s largest antipoverty organization advocates a market-oriented approach to job creation and poverty alleviation, putting poor borrowers on a path to prosperity by giving them a “business in box.”
If girls had the same access to resources as their male peers, went to school regularly, led lives free of domestic violence and avoided early marriage, agricultural output would increase 4 percent and the number of malnourished men, women and children would drop 17 percent.
Below is post from Christy Turlington Burns, founder of the non-profit organization, Every Mother Counts and Director/Producer of the documentary film “No Woman, No Cry”. In this article, originally published on Huffington Post, Christy Turlington Burns writes about her experience of returning to Bangladesh for the first time since filming the segment on BRAC’s Manoshi project aimed at improving maternal health in the slums of Dhaka. We started our day at Dhaka Medical College’s teaching hospital where we learned more about one of the most common pregnancy-related morbidities (or disabilities) that poor women endure in childbirth; obstetric fistula. An obstetric fistula is when a woman suffers an obstructed labor, ultimately tearing a hole in her birth canal. Fistulas lead to incontinence of urine, feces and often cause infertility. Equally as devastating is that most women with fistulas are ostracized by their families and communities.