Thank you, Abed bhai | BRAC
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Basically BRAC's Fazle Abed was the real 50 year story of south asian village girl educational & economics development over 50 years - not muhammad yunus but he was also much more than that
As a teenager in East Pakistan he went to Glasgow University to study engineering and then as a chartered accountant he had become Shell Oil's CEO for East Pakistan when a local cyclone 1970 killed half a million people all around him- he sold his putney flat and with 16000 pounds but a lot of connections settled in a village region of bangladesh where from a dozen or more concepts the first 2 biggest solutions for how women could develop villages were
china 's barefoot medics -fortunately this started up decades of shared solutions between poorest village china and brac
borlaug's rice science
abed designed microfranchises so that a village women could learn either of these trades and make positive cashflow - fortunately james grant at unicef understood that barefoot medics teaching mothers to do oral rehydration could save lives of infants a third of whom were dying from dehydration and supported fazle scaling across 200000 villages late 1970s
so with there was now the need to design banking for 200000 villages - about half a million barefoot nurses and rice growing businesses owned by village mothers - microfinance was the banking system/trust tailormade to train and designing value chains round village womens networks
each decade fazle abed leapt ahead with both education and livelihood innovations -he was patient when needed to be but he almost always saw what the next opportunity would be that bottom up servant leaders could do differently from top-down government -he never argued with government, he simply scaled what they had no access or passion to do in the villages-in the 80s his village mothers asked for primary schools - so brac eventually sustained 50000 schools-fazle abed would always prefer to be a servant leader of action learning -belatedly he has won all the largest education prizes
as well as becoming the national leader in poultry and dairy in the 1990s and starting a city bank so as to be represented in every part of the national value chain
as mobile and solar tech became available the 2000s 2010s and 2020s were the most extraordinary
-for the first time brac went international in the 2000s - this has led to it now being the largest ngo partnership economy in the world all in trust for bottom billion girls
in 2010s bKash | It's that simple a model for digital banking bottom billion has evolved - today main partners are bill gates and jack ma
when my father died 2010 sir fazle and his tech wizard keynoted 2 roundtables at the Japan embassy in dhaka - dad had earned the emperors prize for his work at The Economist advancing win-win economic models out of japan and across asia pacific since 1962
we were amazed to hear how fazle abed wanted his legacy to be a university that linked all asian sustainability solutions together through a ring of partnerships with eg hong kong singapore tokyo beijing and back across every asian country which at one time the brits had colonised especially wherever cultural reconciliation is most needed for girls to thrive
vincent chang was headhunted to relaunch brac university with ban ki-moon asking the university to get in the middle of community & climate adaptability research http://www.gca.org -
sustainability world's most exciting puzzle - welcome to socialbusiness.tv chinathanks.com microeducate and microfranchise 3 billion jobsThe first year of this new movement will land on glasgow cop26- of course I am sad that Fazle Abed as Glagow U's greatest alumni since adam smith didnt get to see attempts of all his partners to unite thisIf this is the sort of map your institute wants to help web its best I introduce you directly to vincent chang as there is so much direct work to do :2/3 people are asian and can lead sdg decade if japan korea china and bangladesh linkin now around bottom up community solutions as well as infrastructure for sme networking and AI education - i am a statistician and researcher but not an implementer, so hope to help brac U search out partners who want youth to scale pan asia sdg solutions- yes this version of DC seems not to value such an sdg-youth search yet(I come from 5 generations of diaspora scots who love all peoples we have worked with and prefer not to spend time on the stuff nationalist politicians rule over)happy holidays chris macrae +1 240 316 8157
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