draft review for amazon of Driving Development
This book is written by 20+ of the senior managers whose lifetime endeavors helped to build BRAC to be the world's largest NGO partnership and one of the 3 most purposeful organisations of over 1000 worldwide brands that expert communications friends and I have researched. BRAC was in its 44th year of bottom-up development when this book was published.
Founded in 1972 by Fazle Abed, previously the CEO of Shell E. Pakistan, this book focuses on the grassroots stories of linking in every service villages need to build to be communally resilient as well as to empower girls livelihoods. Villages back in 1972 meant spaces with no electricity nor forms of communication other than person to person networking. Consequently BRAC is the world's leading model of beyond classroom livelihood education reaching up to 150 million alumni. To those used to classroom examination and top-down expert specialists, the idea that by starting bottom up a network could respond to every life shaping demand multiplying trust through sustainability-critical microfranchise solutions may seem alien. However if you want to build an economic model round serving the bottom billion women in the world -so that market value chains are designed around their enterprise, BRAC is the only pre-digital case of huge scale to be exponentially flourishing today
What this book does not tell you much about is how BRAC navigated digital partnerships as Bangladesh started to be the world's laboratory for girls end extreme poverty from 1996 when both village mobile and microsolar knowledge partners came to Bangladesh. After 15 visits to Bangladesh, I realise that an attempt to publish this second story in book form would be a fool.s errands. That's because it depends on which top 20 or so digital partners not only contribute to BRAC's deepest goals but map each other's boundaries so they each multiply more value and outreach in a collaborative ecosystem the like of which no western business school has got close to studying. It had become ever more likely that BRAC would need to join in forming a new eastern cluster of public service universities and big-data small technology wizards. That is if its digital acceleration is to be fully understood around all the trading crossroads that Bangladesh's position in Eurasia connects. Fortunately, latest indications are that 3 billion Chinese and South Asian people will be up to forming this new world of 3 billion jobs that millennials will need to co-create to be the sustainable generation, If you are female or value women holding up half the sky, lets pray for peace and climate common sense to flourish because those are external factors beyond anything that even the most courageous of Asian women can directly influence
The fact that driving does not attempt to map BRAC digital extension to banking, education, health service, energy for etc a bottom billion girls should not put you off buying this book. In fact I would argue that you have to understand the pre-digital core of BRAC - still by far its largest number of educational co-workers - before deciding what digital partner is needed next to win-win with everyone who already puts every element of their being in to BRAC's extraordinary mission and goodwill multiplication
Transparency note: when ,my father The Economist's Norman Macrae died in 2010 we were 5 years into visiting Bangladesh with young journalists to try to understand the extraordinary stories of Muhammad Yunus and Sir Fazle Abed. In 2012 the kindest remembrance parties to my father were convened by the Japan Embassy in Dhaka celebrating 2 roundtable dialogues -one mediated by Sir Fazle Abed founder of BRAC and the other mediated by Kamal Quadir Sir Fazle's founder of bkash which has emerged as end poverty world's largest cashless bank.