Part 5/5 – How BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity”: #5 Building Capacity and Providing Employment Opportunities

This blog post is part 5 in a 5 part series, Five Ways that BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity” for Women.

#1 Confronting Male Violence against Women
#2 Empowering Women Economically
#3 Fighting Maternal Mortality and Providing Healthcare to the Poorest
#4 Educating Girls Who Have Been Forgotten
#5 Building Capacity and Providing Employment Opportunities

BRAC has steadily built itself into an organization with 125,000 employees and an estimated outreach of 110 million people. Since 2006, BRAC's presence in Africa has created many employment opportunties. Today, 94% of our staff there are local.


Three examples of how BRAC builds capacity and provides employment opportunities:


1.) BRAC's fair trade organization Aarong protects and promotes Bangladeshi handicrafts and the people that produce them. Aarong embraces and nurtures a diverse representation of 65,000 artisans, 85% of whom are women. Aarong provides revenue and benefits to these independent rural artisans by creating and sustaining a market for innovative and stylish products.


2.) In Bangladesh, BRAC employs 6,000 community health workers. These individuals are trained by BRAC to survey and manage a network of 80,000 community health volunteers. Each communtiy health worker supervises and manages 20 volunteers. They manage BRAC's vital frontline in the diagnosis and treatment of disease which provides health care to 92 million people.


3.) BRAC is currently running 38,250 primary and 24,750 pre-primary in Bangladesh alone. All these schools create thousands of teaching opportunities! Additionally, BRAC has trained over 26,000 non-government secondary school teachers.