WHO’S WHO IN MICROFINANCE: Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder of BRAC (the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee)

Fazle Hasan Abed is the founder and chairperson of BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), the Bangladesh based development organization dedicated to poverty alleviation and rural empowerment. BRAC was founded in February 1972 an almost entirely donor-funded, small-scale relief and rehabilitation project to aid post-Liberation War Bangladesh and has now expanded into a private development organization dedicated to poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor, serving an estimated 100 million Bangladeshis with presence in all 64 districts of Bangladesh.

Mr. Abed was born in 1936 in Sylhet, Bangladesh to a wealthy landowner. He studied Accountancy at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh and later at the University of Glasgow in Britain. Following his graduation, Mr. Abed started his career as a financial executive with Shell Oil and was posted in the city of Chittagong in former East Pakistan. The cyclone of 1970 that killed close to 500,000 people in Bangladesh and the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh had a profound effect on Mr. Abed who, at the time, was working as a senior corporate executive accountant at Shell. This prompted him to leave his job and settle in London to support Bangladesh’s war effort. While in London, Mr. Abed helped initiate a campaign called Help Bangladesh to organize funds for the war effort and raise awareness in the world about the genocide in Bangladesh.

After the war, Mr. Abed returned to his home country – the newly independent nation of Bangladesh – and found its economy in ruins. In addition to the urgent relief and rehabilitation needs of the millions of returning refugees, Mr. Abed also realized that merely repairing the facilities that existed before would not be sufficient for the needs of a new nation. Deciding that a more complete scheme for rural development would be necessary, Mr. Abed initially took the money left from Help Bangladesh and founded the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC) in 1972, primarily to rehabilitate returning refugees. The name later changed to Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee as its philosophic orientation broadened to include the long-term goal of improving the living conditions of the rural poor. The initial BRAC experience strengthened Mr. Abed’s belief that the poor cannot be expected to organize themselves on their own given their economic insecurity, illiteracy and general lack of confidence. He believed that the process of social mobilization must be accompanied by measures to empower and remove these handicaps. Thus, Alleviation of Poverty and Empowerment of the Poor emerged as BRAC’s primary objectives.

Strongly believing that the empowerment of women was a necessary precondition for sustainable poverty alleviation, Mr. Abed began promoting a development culture with women at the forefront of all BRAC activities, be it micro-credit, health, or education. In line with Mr. Abed’s philosophy on women empowerment, BRAC has so far organized about 6 million women into over 180,000 groups called Village Organizations and these groups form the basis for all the programs initiated by BRAC.

As reported in this December 2007 feature on BRAC by MicroCapital, BRAC adopts a holistic approach in addressing poverty in that it employs all of its core programs to help its clients achieve and maintain livelihoods. This holistic approach stems from Mr. Abed’s philosophy that there is no one single remedy to poverty but a range of interventions, often at large scale, which are required to fight poverty. Thus, Mr. Abed’s multidimensional poverty reduction approach has led to a range of programs being initiated under the BRAC umbrella namely, the BRAC Economic Development Program; the BRAC Education Program, the BRAC Health Program, the BRAC Social Development program, the BRAC Human Rights and Legal Education Services Program and the BRAC Agriculture Program. As of August, 2008 BRAC had issued USD 5 billion in micro-loans to nearly seven million borrowers.

Mr. Abed’s other significant contributions include his efforts in the 1970s to reduce Bangladesh’s extremely high infant mortality rate (258 deaths per 1000 in 1970) due to dehydration. Mr. Abed reached out to nearly 13 million households in Bangladesh to spread awareness on rehydration methods and thus played an integral role in bringing down Bangladesh’s infant mortality rates to 75 deaths per 1000 by the early 1980s. Mr. Abed’s achievements also include establishing the BRAC University in Bangladesh in April, 2001.

For his immense contribution to Bangladesh, Mr. Abed has received widespread recognition and awards. Described as a ‘brilliant visionary’ by Katharine McKee, the Director of micro-enterprise at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Mr. Abed’s awards include the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award (1990), the Olof Palme Award (2001), Social Entrepreneurship Award by the Schwab Foundation (2002), the Gates Award for Global Health (2004), and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Mahbud ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution in Human Development (2004). He was awarded Doctorate of Laws from Queen’s University in Canada in 1994, an Honorary Doctorate of Education by University of Manchester, UK in 2003 and a Doctorate of Human Letters by Yale University in 2007.

Mr. Abed previously served as a member of the World Bank NGO Committee in Geneva, Switzerland, the Board of Governors at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex University, United Kingdom and the Board of Governors for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Philippines. Mr. Abed was also a visiting scholar at the Harvard Institute of International Development, Harvard University, USA. He is currently the Global Chairperson of International Network of Alternative Financial Institutions (INAFI) and Commissioner of the United Nations Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. He is also Chairman of the BRAC Bank Limited and President of the Governing Board of BRAC University. Abed has authored many publications on participatory development, social mobilization; please lookup here for a list of all publications by Mr. Abed.

By Bharathi Ram, Research Associate

Additional Resources:

Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee: Home, About Us, Founder and Chairman, Awards

Business Week: July, 2002: Fazle Hasan Abed

MicroCapital.org:

December 2007: WHO’S WHO: BRAC

United Nations Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor

United States Agency for International Development

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