Learning From BRAC: Reflections and Questions

Posted on 11 September 2009

By Lauren Murphy

My time spent at BRAC in Dhaka, Bangladesh, reframed my perspective on a surprising number of development and humanitarian issues. After experiencing life in both the city and rural areas of Bangladesh, I came away with a more nuanced understanding of women’s rights and equality, religious frameworks and development, and informal labor. I worked on an expanding financial solvency and social empowerment project targeted at adolescent girls, and I witnessed the inner workings of an NGO behemoth that runs parallel to the Bangladeshi government.

Unlike Grameen Bank and other microfinance institutions, BRAC loans money to adolescent girls for income-generating activities. I traveled to Bangladesh to assess the effectiveness of this somewhat controversial lending model.

BRAC Center is a 20-story office, and BRAC employs over 100,000 people, the majority based in Dhaka. I quickly came to realize that my most meaningful analysis would come from getting out of the capital city. I had the opportunity to observe BRAC’s many programs, from ultra-poor village organization meetings, to school houses, medical services, and even their retail stores. My village experiences allowed me to observe the adolescent girls’ impressive skillfulness with embroidery and handicrafts. I was often frustrated by their hopelessness and lack of market linkages for their products. I felt they lacked exposure to positive female role models and often could not conceptualize how best to use their loans from BRAC.

After multiple visits to the field, the following questions came to mind, and I am still formulating my responses to them:

How do we ensure that appropriately aged girls are using loans for their own income-generating activities? Are girls really escaping poverty or are microfinance institutions creating future dependent borrowers?

Is lending to adolescent girls effectively delaying marriage, eliminating dowry, and promoting more years of education?

Is lending to young girls ethical? Considering that most villagers do not have valid birth certificates, how can we innovate flexible monitoring and evaluation techniques?

What most surprised me at first was how quickly things go to scale at BRAC. Mr. Fazle Abed, BRAC’s CEO, is a man who takes great risk.  He does not believe a program needs to be perfected before being expanded. In his view, the bugs inevitably work themselves out along the way. This sentiment ran counter to my inclination to perfect a pilot and then expand, but I was constantly reminded that while small is beautiful, big is necessary, especially in a country of 153 million people.

Mr. Abed has been BRAC’s CEO since its inception. As his retirement looms, I wonder what course BRAC will take as he and other senior-level directors retire. Will the change in management cause drastic differences in BRAC’s vision and approach?

The ordinary nature of the BRAC office also struck me. Employees work reasonable hours in simple conditions, yet what they produce is nothing short of extraordinary. To date, BRAC’s education department has touched the lives of more than 3.8 million children, 93% of which come from rural areas. BRAC is largely divided into silos of expertise, and I was impressed by how such differently focused branches could streamline their agendas in such a seamless, efficient way.

While at BRAC, I came to realize that many other NGOs in Bangladesh are doing similar work with adolescent girls. To my surprise, however, very few of the project heads and CEOs were talking to each other and sharing their experiences. This exasperated me, and I tried to meet with as many NGO leaders to talk about similarities between the projects. If so many people are in dire need of help in Bangladesh, why are institutions repeating each other’s work instead of seeking synergies and expanding access? To what extent is this lack of collaboration donor-driven?

BRAC is in the midst of impressive global expansion: it now provides health, education, financial, disaster relief and other services to Afghans, Pakistanis and citizens of several African countries.  I am fascinated as to whether BRAC’s Bangaldeshi model, implemented elsewhere by interim Bangladeshi directors, will achieve the kinds of results it has in Bangladesh. Can the BRAC model be adapted for broad international expansion with diverse populations in a variety of contexts?

Lauren Murphy, second year Master in Public Policy student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government reflects on her summer internship at BRAC in Bangladesh. BRAC is one of the largest poverty-fighting NGOs in the world and now has offices in Afghanistan, Tanzania, Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Liberia, among other countries.