UVA Law Student and Bar President Dan Rosenthal Visits BRAC Uganda

Daniel J. Rosenthal is a third year law student and President of the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia School of Law. Below is Dan's post about his recent trip to visit BRAC's programs in Uganda.

As a result of the weakening market, many of the largest law firms in the world have asked newly hired associates to defer their start date for upwards of one year. For many students who are looking to work at private law firms, the idea of a deferral year may be viewed as somewhat of a setback, but as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel once said "never let a good crisis go to waste."

As president of the Student Bar Association, I have focused a great deal of energy exploring ways to encourage public service and public interest work at UVa. In particular, I have focused on a strategy to promote international legal work for current students as well as recent graduates. My goal is to show that a deferral is a golden opportunity to make a meaningful work as well as be exposed to thought provoking and challenging public service experiences that will make us more competent, empathetic, well-rounded lawyers regardless of the area of law that we choose to practice in.

It was with this in mind that I decided to travel to Uganda in August 2009 to research the myriad of opportunities available to UVa law students and share my experience with those who might be interested in working for one of the many international organizations engaged in development work within the country.

BRAC recognizes the value of skilled volunteers and also the impact such an experience can have on the lives of young professionals. To help me with my research, BRAC USA and BRAC Uganda offered to help coordinate my trip and provide access to their amazing programs and dedicated staff. During my stay I was able to visit numerous programs in the areas of microfinance, health, agriculture and adolescent development. While I was impressed by each of these programs and the individuals I met, I was most moved by the young woman I met at an adolescent girls club in Jinja. I really enjoyed spending the afternoon with the group of smart, confident young women and could see just how imperative this program is for empowerment and leadership development.

I have recently started work on a website, www.oneyearforchange.com to not only document my experiences but provide a place where my peers can post stories of the amazing things they are doing during their deferral year as well as provide a clearinghouse to list overseas opportunities that students might not be aware of.

Needless to say, what I saw when I ate, slept and worked in these communities was an eye opening experience for me. I saw both extreme poverty and incredible dedication and commitment to overcoming it. Most of all, I saw the power that comes with giving members of a community a sense of hope and personal worth. It was a truly amazing thing to see and experience. I want to thank everyone at BRAC and BRAC USA for their hospitality and openness in allowing me to observe the important work they are doing in Uganda and around the world. Thank you for all that you do.

Interested in learning more about BRAC in Uganda? Click here to learn how you can meet BRAC Uganda's Country Manager.

Partnership launched to break the cycle of disease and poverty in Haiti

Collaboration through the Clinton Global Initiative seen as innovative approach to addressing challenges in Haiti

Fonkoze, BRAC, BRAC USA, Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante, CGAP, CHF Partners in Rural Development and Linked Foundation have joined forces to commit $50 million towards a two-year effort to implement a proven, replicable, cost-effective approach to improving health and reducing extreme poverty in Central Haiti.

President Clinton’s appointment as United Nations special envoy to Haiti and the fifth annual Clinton Global Initiative draw attention to the extreme and persistent poverty in Haiti and the need for innovative solutions.

Fonkoze and Zanmi Lasante, two leading Haitian NGOs with decades of experience in the target area, together with BRAC, the largest NGO in the Global South, and other organizations are using their complementary strengths to improve health, eliminate extreme poverty, and develop youth leaders in this hemisphere’s poorest country.

Click here to read the full press release.

You can see the commitment announcement at the Clinton Global Initiative plenary session today at 1pm. Click here to see the webcast.

BRAC at the Clinton Global Initiative

BRAC Founder & Chairperson F.H. Abed and BRAC USA President & CEO are attending this year's Clinton Global Initiative. You can watch the webcast of the different sessions by clicking here.

Make sure you're watching the plenary on Thursday at 1pm (EDT) for a special announcement about BRAC's newest commitment!

Also, be sure to tune in on Friday morning at 9am to hear Abed discuss Moving From Crisis to Opportunity: Financing an Equitable Future with Sheila Blair, James Dimon and Peter Sands.

The plenary will address how to move beyond the current economic and financial crisis to tap innovative sources of financing that can provide stable, ethical, and scalable funding for organizations addressing the world's most challenging problems. The panel will bring together voices from across the financial continuum to discuss how the financial system can work for all. It will point the way to align interests of public, private, and philanthropic capital to build solutions for a more equitable world.

BRAC USA invites all its friends and supporters for a meet-and-greet with Ariful Islam, Country Manger of BRAC Uganda

Ariful Islam, who has played a critical role in scaling up BRAC's programs in Africa, will be in New York for just one week at the beginning of October. Join BRAC USA for a meet-and-greet with Arif.

Topic: Scaling up Microfinance in Africa - Learning from What Works: The Story of how BRAC grew in less than three years to become one of the largest microfinance institutions in Uganda.

When: October 1, 2009; 6:30-8 pm

Where: Weil Gotshal, 767 5th Ave.
(SE corner of 59th St), Room 24 D&E.

RSVP: Alyssa Herman at alyssa@bracusa.org

Many thanks to Weil Gotshal for sponsoring this event.

About Ariful Islam:
Ariful Islam is the Country Manager of BRAC Uganda. He has played an instrumental role in launching BRAC's programs in Uganda in November of 2005, and growing it to become one the largest microfinance institutions in the country, within a span of three years. BRAC Uganda has disbursed $35 million in loans to more than 90,000 borrowers through its network of 85 branch offices. It has also scaled up health, agriculture, adolescent development and education programs. Under Arif's visionary leadership, BRAC has emerged as the largest non-profit in the country, employing more than 1,500 people and touching the lives of more than half a million poor people in Uganda.

Arif joined BRAC in 1983 as a Program Organizer, and has since served as Regional Manager, Zonal Manager, and Program Manager of BRAC’s education program in both Bangladesh and Afghanistan. He holds a Masters in Education and Development from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

BRAC USA Meets Better Business Bureau Standards for Charity Accountability

We are pleased to announce that BRAC USA has successfully completed the Better Business Bureau (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance's Online Charity Evaluation and meets all 20 standards for charity accountability.

A copy of the report which summarizes basic facts about BRAC USA's governance, programs, finances, fund raising and operations can be found here.

A more detailed description of the BBB Standards for Charity Accountability can be found here.

The story of Kur Angelina: A BRAC Community Health Volunteer in Southern Sudan

During a recent trip to Southern Sudan, Santhosh Ramdoss, Program Manager at BRAC USA met with Kur Angelina a BRAC Community Health Volunteer in Southern Sudan. He narrates her story below:

I met Angelina inside her one room hut in the Jebel Kuzur area of Juba. The first thing you would notice about her is her incredible smile. She was so delighted that we visited her home and was overflowing with joy. Her home was surrounded by a few other huts and was completely inaccessible by road. The hut was fully stacked with materials for her business – she rents out audio equipment for marriages and funerals and sometimes conducts musical shows herself. She had learnt to sing from an American-born nun who had provided her asylum during the war. After cease-fire was declared, she returns back to Juba the rest of her family. She has seven children, including a newborn baby.

Angelina has been providing basic health services to people living around her for the last one year. She first got involved with BRAC as a microfinance borrower and when a BRAC staff person approached her to ask if she would be willing to become to become a Community Health Volunteer (CHV), she jumped at the opportunity. She mentioned to me how she always wanted to be a nurse, but never had resources to help her realize this dream. However, she sees her role as a BRAC CHV to be even nobler, providing critical health services to people within her own community.

Angelia was also among the first batch of CHVs who received basic health products to be sold to other community members. Her entire inventory worth $75 was sold within the first two months, mainly because people living around her have to commute at least 4 kilometers to reach a nearest medical shop in Juba town. When they realized that they could buy medicines in their own village for affordable prices, people started coming to her more often.

Angelina was thankful to BRAC. She felt such a strong sense of gratitude that she wanted to name her newborn child ‘BRAC’. “People are dying everyday – there are no doctors, no hospitals” she says, “if children fall sick, even from simple diseases like diarrhea, people don’t know what to do and its not easy for a mother to watch a child die”. She said confidently, “I think I can help them, I think we can stop this”.

Thank You! BRAC USA Friendraiser was a grand success

BRAC USA just hosted a Friendraiser at the Edwynn Houk gallery in New York City. There were over two-hundred guests, ranging from longtime BRAC supporters to those just getting to know us and eager to learn more about our work.

BRAC USA thanks Angon and Johnnie Walker for their generous sponsorship, the Edwynn Houk gallery for lending us their magnificent space, and the volunteers and host committee members without whom the event would not have been possible.

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.

Part 4/5 – How BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity”: #4 Educating Girls Who Have Been Forgotten

This blog post is part 4 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

A girl in Bangladesh is far more likely to go to school than a Pakistani or Afghan girl.

BRAC has graduated 6 million girls and boys from its 66,000 pre-primary and primary schools. Today BRAC runs 4,000 schools for girls in Afghanistan and has recently piloted an education program in Pakistan.

When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later, the population’s overall HIV rate will go down and malnutrition will decrease by 43%.

For example:

Dipti's father was a blacksmith and died when she was very young, leaving her young brothers to take over the trade at an early age.

Because she could not afford the school supplies and uniform for a government primary school, Dipti went to a BRAC primary school. She received a scholarship from BRAC to go to a secondary school, which also received support from BRAC through its teacher and management training program.

After completing her secondary education, Dipti won a full scholarship to get a degree at an Indian university. She is the first girl in her village to go to college.

"If it were not for BRAC," she says, "my education would have ended, full stop."

Part 3/5 – How BRAC Turns “Oppression into Opportunity”: #3 Fighting Maternal Mortality

This blog post is part 3 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

The equivalent of five jumbo jets’ worth of women die in child labor each day*. Sierra Leone’s maternal mortality ratio is the highest in the world, with one in eight women dying during pregnancy or childbirth.

When BRAC started, women in Bangladesh were having 6 babies on average; today they are having 2. BRAC is now providing maternal health care in places such as Afghanistan, Southern Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda where women are still having 6 children.

BRAC uses 74,000 community health volunteers to provide basic health services, including prenatal and antenatal care, to more than 92 million poor people.

For example:

Eliamulika Noeli is one of BRAC's community health volunteers in Tengeru, Tanzania. Every month, she visits between 150 and 200 households - reaching up to 1,000 people.

She keeps tabs on all the families she visits, paying special attention to women who are pregnant or new mothers. She provides prenatal care and refers pregnant women to give birth in local hospitals, where they have less of a chance of dying from complications during childbirth. She also provides antenatal care and ensures that all children under five in the households she visits are properly vaccinated.

In addition to providing life-saving information to the women and their families in her community, Noeli and the 74,000 other community health volunteers supplement their income by selling health related products - like soap, contraceptives, and oral rehydration salts - that BRAC provides them with. Here you can see Noeli selling de-worming medication, one of her best sellers, to her microfinance group members.

* From Half the Sky, forthcoming book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn