BRAC, the World’s Largest Antipoverty Group Comes to Africa

BRAC is the largest antipoverty group in the world, with 110,000 paid employees and a $482 million annual budget. BRAC helped pull Bangladesh out of the ashes, now the founder, Fazle Hasan Abed (photo), wants to take on Africa.

How did he do it? By giving incentives and being big.

When BRAC commenced operations shortly after Bangladesh’s independence, Abed knew that the poor needed help to overcome their economic insecurity. He felt the only way to start the process of social mobilization and remove the handicaps of poverty is to introduce incentives and scale upwards.

“There are market incentives in everything we do”, Abed said, “If you want to do significant work, you have to be large. Otherwise we’d be tinkering around on the periphery.”

BRAC’s use of incentive-based social entrepreneurship program is replicated “in 1,000 urban slums and 70,000 rural villages across Bangladesh”. Forbes reports:

Its microfinance program has made $4.6 billion in loans versus $6.9 billion from the better-known microlender Grameen. It runs 52,000 preschools and primary schools, with 1.5 million students. Its 68,000 health care volunteers, egged on by financial incentives, cover a population of 80 million. It operates commercial dairies, silkworm-raising centers and department stores to provide markets for the goods its poor beneficiaries produce…

Abed is now bringing BRAC into Africa. The Gates Foundation has given $15 million in grants and loans to replicate BRAC’s microfinance, agriculture and health programs in Tanzania, and the Nike Foundation is giving $1 million to establish designated centers for teenage girls in Tanzania. BRAC has set up organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. to bring in more charitable dollars.

And there are good reasons why the big nonprofits are throwing money at BRAC and pushing it in Africa’s direction:

The World Bank credits BRAC in part with what it calls the “Bangladesh paradox”: Despite an impotent government (leaders of the two primary political parties are currently in jail on corruption charges), this country of 145 million people has improved significantly. According to the World Bank, the fraction of the population living in poverty (defined as below $2 a day in purchasing power) dropped from 58% in 1992 to 40% in 2005; secondary school enrollment has climbed from 19% in 1990 to 43% today and childhood immunization from 1% in 1980 to 80% today.