The following was originally posted by Alice Korngold on Fast Company. Alice Korngold is a Fast Company expert blogger, CEO of Korngold Consulting, and author of “Leveraging Good Will: Strenthening Non-profits by Engaging Businesses.”
BRAC launched the livestock and poultry program in Sierra Leone in 2008. We have been developing many supporting activities such as disease management, poultry vaccination, dissemination of improved breed of cow through artificial insemination, supply of livestock and poultry feed and milk processing and distribution.
Below is an article published on the Nourishing the Planet blog by Matt Styslinger, who worked as Student Researcher at BRAC in 2008/ 2009, conducting field research on BRAC’s Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene (WASH) Program.
The following article was written by Sofia Tillo for MediaGlobal. You can read the original article here. Microfinance is nothing new, having brought access to financial services for the world’s poorest people for the past two decades. Particularly common are initiatives giving small private loans to people in least developed countries.
Today at the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Summit Special Event on the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, BRAC founder and chairperson Sir Fazle Hasan Abed pledged to mobilize $700 million over the next five years to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals of reducing child and maternal mortality and saving the lives of millions of the worlds most vulnerable in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Haiti.
Almost 21 million people are now reported as having been directly affected by the devastating floods in Pakistan. With 23 out of 94 BRAC Pakistan’s microfinance branches affected by the flooding, BRAC is close to the people and communities that have been suffering as the disaster began to unfold in July.
Having recently returned from Afghanistan, I was encouraged to read a front-page article in last Sunday’s New York Times about Greg Mortenson being the “Unlikely Tutor Giving [US] Military Afghan Advice.”We hope that this is the beginning of more press coverage over the work being done by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Afghanistan.BRAC is one such organization, and we have been working in Afghanistan since 2002. Many Afghan refugees began returning to their war-torn country that year. To BRAC’s founders, such post-conflict humanitarian crisis was similar to what they lived through in Bangladesh after the Bangladesh War. It was in such post-war environment that BRAC was first founded in 1972, not unlike how BRAC Afghanistan was started thirty years later.
I recently spoke on a Council on Foreign Relations panel on maternal health after a special screening of the film ‘No Woman, No Cry’ directed by Christy Turlington Burns and produced by Dallas Brennan Rexer. The film shows the dangers of childbirth when adequate medical care is unavailable. The film extraordinarily captures the real time drama of giving birth. It is a deeply affecting film, which makes the viewer aware of the high risks of procreation, particularly when coupled with poverty.
In a small room in Khilbarirtek village in the impoverished Badda thana area (sub-district) of Dhaka district, Bangladesh, a group of excited adolescents – 28 girls and two boys – are engrossed in playing indoor games. Some are busy with Ludo, while others are concentrating hard to come up with winning moves on the chessboard. All the children are between 11 years and 19 years of age.
This blog post is part 3 in a 5 part series, Five Ways that BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity” for Women.#1 Confronting Male Violence against Women #2 Empowering Women Economically #3 Fighting Maternal Mortality and Providing Healthcare to the PoorestThe equivalent of five jumbo jets’ worth of women die in child labor each day*. Sierra Leone’s maternal mortality ratio is the highest in the world, with one in eight women dying during pregnancy or childbirth.
Recently, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) interviewed BRAC Founder and Chairperson Fazle Hasan Abed about BRAC’s work in Bangladesh and how we are using what we have learned as we establish and scale up programs throughout Africa and Asia.Below is an excerpt from the interview: