Anthony Muljadi, a former BRAC Bangladesh intern and a student at Harvard Business School writes about the importance of partnerships for the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference blog.
Last summer I took a microfinance internship in Bangladesh with BRAC, the world’s largest development NGO serving over 110 million people across 14 countries. I arrived in Bangladesh with a simplistic belief that microfinance was the end-all solution to poverty. After spending a few weeks in the field, however, I quickly realized that while microfinance alleviated financial poverty for many poor Bangladeshis, it did not directlyaddress their educational, health, and enterprise needs of borrowers. BRAC has long recognized this gap, and thus takes a holistic approach to addressing poverty by offering a portfolio of resources (education, health, training, etc.) to its clients depending on individual needs. In this way, BRAC behaves as a social enterprise conglomerate – a one stop shop for all of its clients’ basic needs. Seeing the breadth of services that BRAC offered, I started thinking about how smaller enterprises could broaden their community impact without needing to become conglomerates. Partnerships appeared to be the best option to accomplish this goal. After doing some research, I realized that partnerships could take on many forms (e.g. corporations with non-profits, governments with social enterprises, etc) and create a number of mutual benefits, including brand awareness, access to new networks, and resource sharing.
One success story of corporate and non-profit collaboration is the “FDNY CPR To Go” partnership between the Fire Department of New York City (FDNY) and New York Sports Club (NYSC). Last year, the FDNY was looking to expand its free CPR training programs, but did not have adequate facilities or demand. On the other hand, NYSC had excess space at certain times during the day and a strong membership base. Working with Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Service office, NYSC offered space for FDNY to conduct CPR training. While the FDNY benefited from greater outreach and free space, the NYSC benefited from increased PR and business by offering free trial memberships to all CPR trainees. It was win-win – clients of both organizations benefited from an expanded portfolio of health services.
This success story should not be taken as a silver bullet. Although cross-sector partnerships are gaining popularity, they can often be difficult to form. Despite knowing their own resources and needs, organizations might have difficulty identifying complementary partners. With the advent of social media and the proliferation of collaboration databases and volunteer-match sites, the social impact partnership space is growing.
Given the vast potential in this area, I am eager to attend the “Strategy and Innovations in Cross-Sector Partnerships” Panel at the 2011 Harvard Social Enterprise Conference, where leaders in the field will gather to discuss the latest developments in partnerships for social impact. The four amazing keynote speakers, including Root Capital CEO Willy Foote, Paul Carttar from the Social Innovation Fund, Clinton Global Initiative CEO Robert Harrison, and Beatrice Biira from Millennium Promise, reflect the diversity of capabilities that must be brought to bear to create social change, and I realize now that it is the partnerships between these groups that generate large-scale impact. The Social Enterprise Conference is a gathering place for individuals who are passionate about social impact, and I hope it becomes a launching point for the high impact partnerships of the future.
Below is an aricle published on BBC by Junaid Khan about BRAC's crab fattening projects in Khulna, Bangladesh
"We realised that there was no chance of the water receding anytime soon," says Dr Babar Kabir of the non-governmental organisation Brac, which has been helping with relief and rehabilitation work in the area.
Crab farming has enabled Mujib to provide a new home for his family
But instead of aid, Brac gave farmers money to buy small crabs, fatten them up and sell them back for export to countries such as Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.
Some crabs can grow as heavy as 4kg and fetch up to $5 apiece. Dr Kabir says the project shows that if land becomes unsuitable to grow crops, it can be used in other ways."We tried to move people away from a relief mentality." And paradoxically in this case, "water gives you a better economic return than land", he told the BBC World Service.
Below is an article published on The Hindu by Aarti Dhar about BRAC's health interventions in Bangladesh
“Bangladesh focussed strongly on the disadvantaged section of society, particularly women, in the past three decades that led to employment, availability of micro-credit, education and overall empowerment. These were the building blocks of good health in the country,” according to Timothy G. Evans, Dean of James P. Grant School of Public Health at the BRAC University in Dhaka.
Citing examples of low-cost effective interventions, Dr. Evans said oral rehydration therapy (ORT) was one such method that was promoted to prevent diarrhoea, which was a major cause of infant mortality. It was the group of non-governmental organisations under the BRAC that popularised the ORT with remarkable results.
A different, ingenious approach is taken by BRAC in Bangladesh. Nearly 30 years old, BRAC is a poverty-fighting organization, and a giant one — health care is only one of the things its 28,000 employees do. It also has more than 80,000 community health workers, which it calls volunteers, who cover more than 100 million people.
The volunteers work on basic maternal and child health, but their biggest job is curing tuberculosis, a very labor-intensive enterprise. The hard part of curing TB is ensuring that patients keep taking all their medicines for six months. So BRAC’s village health workers watch their patients swallow their pills every day. This is a proven health intervention called DOTS, for Directly Observed Treatment, Short-course, that has greatly improved TB cure rates around the world.
Mushtaque Chowdhury , who was deputy executive director of BRAC and oversaw its health programs, said that compensation for health workers was critical for success. But BRAC can’t pay 80,000 salaries. So, like Jamkhed, BRAC offers its health volunteers income opportunities. Unlike Jamkhed — where health workers make money in non-health businesses — BRAC’s plan encourages the volunteers to spend their time on health care.
Below is an article published on CNN by Sara Sidner about BRAC girls' cricket team
Chittagong, Bangladesh (CNN) -- In a dusty, unkempt field in the middle of Bangladesh's second-largest city, crowds of men and boys gather to watch their favorite sport.
But there is something most unusual about this sight, even in such a cricket-crazy nation.
On this particular field, the men and boys are the spectators and the girls are the ones wielding bats and bowling balls.
"I have never seen girls playing cricket anywhere in Bangladesh before," remarks a male watching on the sidelines.
That is because girls aren't normally given the chance to play. They are generally given less value in society than boys.
"At first people asked: 'Why are girls playing cricket. It's a boys' game, this is a bad thing,' " 15-year-old Rohima Bibi Moni said.
In the slum where she lives, the neighbors taunted her father, saying he was ruining their religiously-conservative society by allowing his girl to play. He almost gave in to their demands.
"Then I thought that I could not do anything in my life, so let my daughter do something," Moni's father Muhammad Sayed said.
Sayed is illiterate. He was never given the chance to go to school.
But instead of marrying his daughter off at the age of 14 -- the age his wife married him -- he allowed Moni to take classes in a school run by BRAC, Bangladesh's largest non-governmental organization.
He was impressed with his daughter's work and even learned a few things from her.
"I could not sign my name before, but I started learning from my daughter and now I can write my name and some others' names," Sayed said.
So a year and a half ago, when BRAC decided to start a girls' cricket team with funding from UNICEF, Moni convinced her parents and went from a shy teenager to the captain of her team.
"God willing someday I will be able to play on the national team," she said.
There are dozens of girls like her, and now there are enough teams in Bangladesh to have a national tournament. There is only enough money to hold a handful of formal training sessions from volunteer coaches, but the girls take what they can and work with it.
Coach Nurul Huda Khan beams when he remembers the hardships the girls have overcome.
"I am very proud! My team is not playing very well but we have been able to bring the team from so far with the help of BRAC. It's a miracle!"
But the proudest of all is Moni's father: "I am now happy she is learning and she is playing. I am delighted with this thing. People from all across Bangladesh watch her play -- she's our pride."
No matter if the girls' teams win or lose a match. Their supporters say they have already aced some life's biggest tests. With the 2011 Cricket World Cup being kicked off in Bangladesh, Moni has gained enough confidence and support to dream even bigger now.
"I will definitely feel good when we see girls like us playing in the World Cup."
Below is a post from Mary Robinson, President of the Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice and a member of the BRAC USA Advisory Council. Mary Robinson recently visited BRAC's programs in Bangladesh. This post was originally published on the Huffington Post on February 15.
Travelling by seaplane to Koyra, in the delta area of Bangladesh, was the equivalent of a journey some years into the future, when the devastating effects of climate change will be an accepted reality worldwide. We landed in an area still devastated by cyclone “Aila” which hit Bangladesh in 2009. A huge amount of once cultivated land was still under water, because of daily tidal fluctuations and the fact that some embankments had not been mended in the nearly two years since Aila.
I spoke to one woman, living with her husband and son in a tiny shack on a narrow embankment they shared with other families who all had to move there when their homes were destroyed. She looked much older than the mother of a seventeen year old, and had a resigned, desperate expression as she pointed to the flooded area where she had once had a decent home and small farm. “We are waiting” she said, “It is two years now, and nothing has happened. We cannot go home.”
Together with my BRAC hosts (http://www.brac.net/) I was driven to meet local farmers and fishermen and women. BRAC have a big programme in Koyra covering education, and advice on climate resilience to over a thousand villages, including training on how to adapt their livelihoods to cope with the brackish, salinated water that has covered their farmlands and traditional fresh water fishing.
We stopped at a large, recently cultivated area to speak with local farmers. They told me how they were growing maize for the first time, as it is able to grow on brackish land, and different varieties of rice which are salt tolerant. I was encouraged to ask questions, which when translated, were answered with a sense of pride. “Yes, we are glad to have new crops to plant. We can now feed our own families”.
Further on, I watched a man standing waist high in a fenced off area of salinated water. He was feeding fish to crabs to fatten them and getting a good economic return from selling the crabs. BRAC had helped to develop a market elsewhere for the crabs and explained that the local Muslims did not eat crab, so it was Hindus such as this farmer who had developed the crab fattening skills. Fortunately, this did not seem to cause any inter-religious tension.
Later I spoke with a group of women, who with their husbands had adapted their fishing skills away from traditional fresh water fishing to fishing for tilapia, a small salt tolerant fish. They had benefitted from training on how best to manage the fish stocks and ensure sustainability. Again, I was encouraged to ask questions, and like their male counterparts the women were happy to discuss the way they had had to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Yes, they liked the fish to eat, and now they were beginning to have a small income again.
As we drove, I noted similar projects for families living on embankments which were supported by other NGOs, and I was shown some latrines provided by Concern. There were women working to build smaller “bolders” as the embankments are called, and men carrying heavy stones on their heads to help construct a roadway into more flooded parts, all work schemes for local people.
However, I was struck by the absence of effective local authority planning and action. When I raised this with a local authority official, who had been invited to join BRAC colleagues at their local center for a working lunch, he shrugged his shoulders at the immensity of the task and referred to the lack of local authority resources. Bangladesh is a least developed country (LDC) which has become the leading LDC negotiator on climate change issues. Its contribution to the problem of green house gas emissions is negligible, but the additional burden of climate change is already being felt. Officials in Dhaka predict that 20 million people may have to leave this region if the global temperature increases by more than 2° Celsius and sea levels rise as predicted. There is nothing theoretical about the climate change issue from this local viewpoint. The injustice of a poor LDC country having to bear huge additional costs from climate impacts it did not contribute to is self evident.
A memorable stop on my visit was to a local primary school run by BRAC. It was organised on the same principles as a BRAC school I had visited the day before in Korail slum, the largest slum in Dhaka. The schools have 30 plus pupils and one teacher, who teaches these children the five year curriculum in four years, through intensive participation and teacher commitment. These are boys and girls who would not otherwise go to school, and their ages differed as a result. I was struck about how enabling the atmosphere was in both the slum school and the local school, full of creativity and a sense of enjoyment of the work and play. In the school in Koyra the children enacted with great gusto – and acting skills – how climate change may happen. One of the taller boys acted as the tree which the others cut down, even though warned not to. The winds came, and the consequences were played out – they all knew where the climate shelter was! As I watched with a grandmother’s eye, it struck me that every primary school around the world should be beginning to bring home to children what we must all do to change our habits. Every school needs to be a “green school”, so that children can educate their parents. For some it will be knowing where the nearest climate shelter is. For others – in the developed world – it will be learning to reuse, reduce, recycle, eat less meat, and travel by public transport, among other ideas.
I watched representatives of two villages receiving disaster preparedness training provided by BRAC. The main method of instruction was to form small groups who discussed together, and then acted out their response to an early warning of the danger from cyclone or sea surge. .What they were learning about disaster risk reduction will become ever more important as climate change aggravates the risk.
We took another small trip in our seaplane, to the immense excitement and pleasure of the crowds of children and villagers who saw us off and a similar group crowded around when we landed again in the water 10 kilometers away! This time I was shown two different types of climate resilient houses developed by the architectural department of BRAC University. The approach to the design was participatory – amongst architects and engineers, home owners, carpenters and masons, to arrive at a combination of skills where the knowledge of each of the participants was optimised. The first “test” house was on concrete stilts, made of local wood and roofed by local tiling. It looked distinctive as we approached by boat, and sturdy. But it was also quite costly for local people. The other “test” house was constructed entirely from local affordable materials, on the theory that if it was destroyed in a particularly bad cyclone or tidal surge, it could be rebuilt relatively easily. The locals seemed divided on which house they preferred but the younger women I asked opted for the house on stilts.
The journey back to Dhaka in our seaplane took 50 minutes. I was told the journey could take from 36 to 40 hours by road. I was not the only passenger who nodded off en route, and as I did, I was thinking of the resilience of the local people I had met. I was struck by their sense of pride in learning to adapt to worsening environmental conditions, and the admirable way in which BRAC empowers communities in all aspects of its work.
Mary Robinson President Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice
The first ever BRAC Brand Awards took place on Wednesday February 2, 2011 at the head office in Bangladesh. The event marked the one year anniversary of the new BRAC brand and 39 years since BRAC's founding. The awards recognized and honored BRAC employees who are ‘living the values’ through their achievements and commitment to BRAC.
Awards were given in three categories including ‘Most Brand Compliant Programme/Department’, ‘Brand Ambassador’ and ‘Living the Values’ (Innovation, Integrity, Inclusiveness, Effectiveness). BRAC Chairperson, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed and the Executive Director, Dr. Mahabub Hossain handed out the awards and prizes to the winners.
'Most Brand Compliant' was awarded to the Microfinance Program for always carefully and consistently following the BRAC brand guideline. Shameran Abed, head of the Microfinance Program received the award on behalf of the Microfinance Program team.
Recipients of the 'Brand Ambassador' award include:
Kazi N Fattah, Program Manager, Community Empowerment & Strengthening Local Institutions
Sadhan Kumar Nandi, Training Manager, HRLS
Mohammed Zahidur Rahman, Management Professional, DECC
Heras Uddin M. Mehedi Sajjad, Senior Manager, Social Enterprise
Recipients of the 'Living the Values' award include:
Dr. Monowarul Aziz, Senior Medical Officer, Health
How BRAC has contributed to saving Bangladeshi mothers
On February 13, 2011, Bangladeshis woke up to some wonderful news: a significant nationwide Maternal Mortality Survey showed that Bangladesh has achieved tremendous improvement in reducing maternal mortality in the last 9 years - a whopping 40% drop, from 322 to 194 per 100,000 live births, putting the nation on track to meet the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 by 2015. Percentage-wise, the rate of decline is about 5.5 percent each year on average, 0.1 percentage point lower than the required 5.4 percent for attaining MDG 5.
"The improvement (in maternal mortality combat rates) is due to several factors including medical, socio-economical and demographic," said Peter Kim Streatfield of ICDDR,B announcing the survey results. Reduction in the number of child marriages and an increase in education for women have also been credited with the improvement.
As an organisation with a holistic approach towards development BRAC has been working for four decades to improve the health awareness of the poor, women in particular. So BRAC takes this opportunity to congratulate not only its participants and staff, but also the government, other NGOs, and all who contributed to achieving this remarkable feat.
Since its establishment in Bangladesh in 1972, BRAC has targeted various interventions towards the improvement of women’s reproductive health – these included health interventions such as improving nutrition, family planning, ante and post natal check ups as well as empowerment interventions such as reducing early marriage etc. As with other successful interventions, BRAC scaled up these programmes throughout the country.
In 2007, with the help of development partners, BRAC started concentrating its efforts on improving maternal, neonatal and child mortality in specific urban and rural areas through two projects – Manoshi in urban areas and Improving Maternal, Neonatal and Child Survival (IMNCS) in rural areas. The programmes comprise a well supervised system of ante and post natal care with trained community health workers and a well functioning referral system to health clinics for complicated cases. IMNCS currently reaches 20 million women in 10 districts while Manoshi reaches 5.7 million women in slums across Dhaka and 5 other city corporations and in addition provides access to safe and hygienic birthing huts as alternatives to home delivery.
For the period of 2007-2010, in areas where Manoshi operates, monitoring of progress shows reduction in home delivery from 86% to 25%, a neonatal mortality of 14 (per 1000 births) and maternal mortality of 162 (per 100,000 births). In the IMNCS areas, progress over the same period shows increase in hospital delivery from 15 to 30%, and reduction of maternal mortality to 157 per 100,000 cases.
Bangladesh is well placed to achieving the MDG 5 target for Maternal Mortality Rate of 143 per 100,000 live births by 2015. However, BRAC recognises that as factors convene to improve MMR, achieving the remaining percentage drop will be most challenging. BRAC looks to work in partnership with the government and other NGOs to overcome this challenge.
To learn more about BRAC's Health Programs, click here.
Earlier this month, I was in Sri Lanka, a beautiful island off the coast of India, with pristine beaches and mist shrouded mountains. The sun soaked beaches of Bentota on the western coast of Sri Lanka belied the reality that the country was facing its worst natural disaster since the Asian tsunami in 2004. Since January, due to heavy rains the eastern coasts of the country has experienced massive flooding. According to the Disaster Management Center over 1.2 million people have been affected, with the areas of Ampara, Batticaloa, Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura and Trincomalee being the worst affected.
More worrying is that these regions are crucial for paddy cultivation, and due to the floods over a third of the paddy crops have been destroyed. Officials estimate that Sri Lanka will lose over one million tons from its upcoming paddy harvest. The resulting food insecurity brings an additional grim dimension to the situation.
There has been a stark contrast between the response to this crisis and the tsunami in 2004. Despite the scale of the damages, coverage of the crisis was minimal in western media and the emergency response has been slow. According to Oxfam, only US $11,6 million has been received toward the flood response; not enough to counter the long term food security concerns of the country. Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children and AmericaCares are some of the humanitarian organizations, in addition to BRAC, engaged in emergency response.
BRAC entered Sri Lanka in 2005 to address the immediate needs of the tsunami-affected populations. BRAC provided safe drinking water by installing tube wells, set up latrines to promote sanitation, provided medical support to the injured, and started a livelihood program to help rehabilitate the tsunami victims. BRAC is once again playing a critical role in emergency response and rehabilitation by launching in program to restore the livelihoods of the flood affected people in the Eastern and North Central provinces by supporting them with agricultural support, safe drinking water and providing materials to the affected students. The program's main objective will be to reestablish livelihoods and food security in the Ampara, Batticaloa, Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura and Trincomalee districts.
Recently, the Carnegie Council's Carnegie Ethics studio editor, Julia Taylor Kennedy, interviewed BRAC USA President & CEO, Susan Davis, as part of a series on global business ethics. Davis and Kennedy discussed how BRAC got its start, how BRAC addresses the ultra-poor through microfinance, and the evolving relationship between corporations and nonprofit organizations. In the interview, Davis mentions how BRAC measures success in alleviating poverty in terms of empowering individuals. She notes, "Although there is no magic bullet, social entrepreneurship unlocks everybody's ability to be a change maker and to participate in the solutions to their own problems."
The full transcript of this revealing and informative conversation is available on the Carnegie Council website here. Audio of the interview is also available here.
The following post was written by Dr. Nicola Banks, Head of BRAC Uganda Research and Evaluation Unit.
With an objective of sharing knowledge on the various research initiatives of BRAC Uganda, a Knowledge Forum was launched by the Research and Evaluation Team on the 29th of January 2011. In the first meeting of the Forum, Munshi Sulaiman, Coordinator, Research presented an evaluation of a food for training programme in South Sudan. Aisha Nansamba, Health Research Associate also presented research ideas around the TB detection programme in Uganda. The presentations were followed by discussions on appropriate approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies and findings.
The Forum is critical to ensure BRAC Uganda continues as a learning organisation and maintains a culture of rigorous research. It is also hoped that the Forum will evolve into a platform for sharing research findings with other audiences particularly practitioners and users of researchers.
The Forum will be meeting every Saturday with the participation of the Research and Evaluation Team to discuss both completed and ongoing research. This we hope will feed back into stronger and more integrated methodologies and analysis. The meetings will also be open for Programme Managers and other interested participants.
To Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC—formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee—“Small is beautiful, but big is necessary.” It is a reference to the book Small is Beautiful by economist E.F. Schumacher, which criticizes western economics and hails small, local economies that empower people and their communities.
BRAC has the ambitious aim to eradicate poverty in Bangladesh. In the recognition that lasting social change that effectively reduces poverty requires a holistic approach to engage every aspect of society, BRAC is anything but small.
Today, it is the world’s largest non-governmental organization (NGO) employing more than 60,000 people and its programs reach over 110 million people. But it’s not just the impressive scale of its projects that has made BRAC so admired among aid agencies, it’s the scope. On its website, BRAC proclaims itself a “pioneer in recognizing and tackling the many different realities of poverty.” And it has the programs to prove it.
Despite the Nobel Prize and the publicity of Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank, BRAC is actually the largest lender of micro-loans in Bangladesh. It runs the largest private school system in the world, and educates 11 percent of Bangladesh’s children—70 percent of whom are girls. It provides public health and awareness services in Bangladesh’s most underserved communities. It promotes food security with agricultural extension services and the development of its own hybrid rice variety. It runs seed processing plants, feed mills, chicken farms, tea plantations, packaging factories, dairy plants, textile operations, a university, and a high-end merchandise chain. At nearly every level BRAC looks to create opportunities for the poor and women to take the reins, helping to create a self-sufficient social and economic infrastructure that can continue to lift the country out of poverty.
BRAC has had a knack for recognizing the interconnectedness of its activities and creating opportunities for cross-pollination. They support, for example, over 2,961 acres of mulberry bush production in Bangladesh’s northern districts. The mulberry bushes yield both a tea and a fruit and support BRAC sericulture, or silk farming. Silkworm larvae feed solely on mulberry leaves. This set of activities provides income-generating opportunities for poor, landless women through farming, silkworm rearing, silk spinning, and weaving. BRAC sericulture employs 7,500 silk rearers and 5,800 spinners and produces 21 metric tons of raw silk annually. BRAC also markets the silk through its own retail chain called Aarong.
According to a recent article in The Economist, BRAC is one of the fastest-growing NGOs in the world—and one of the most business-like. Profits generated from its social enterprises feed back into the organization’s core development programs, making it nearly 80 percent self-funded. It relies on international donors for only the remaining 20 percent of its budget.
After 30 years in Bangladesh, BRAC has now gone international. It’s now the biggest NGO in Afghanistan, Tanzania, and Uganda.
To date in Afghanistan, BRAC has disbursed US$234 million in microfinance loans, with agreements in place to disburse US$65 million more over the next three years. The program is operating in 24 of the country’s provinces. It aims to improve the livelihoods of women and help them realize their potential through entrepreneurship. BRAC uses its microfinance programs as a conduit for engaging the public in heath, education, and other poverty alleviation programs.
In Tanzania, teenage girls are trained by BRAC’s Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents Program to be peer leaders in their communities. Life skills training courses teach the girls to be conscientious, socially aware, and confident citizens. They develop leadership skills, gain better understanding of health issues, learn about conflict resolution and negotiation, and develop awareness of gender imbalance issues. Income generation training teaches them about vegetable cultivation and poultry rearing, tailoring, food processing, and general financial literacy. Small microloans are also made available to the teenage leaders to offer them a chance to put their training into action.
In post-conflict Northern Uganda, BRAC opened what it calls “second-chance” schools for children who had never attended school or dropped out in primary school—largely because of the war. In Uganda, adolescent girls are vulnerable to early, unwanted pregnancy and often know very little about family planning or sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Recognizing that, most of BRAC’s teachers are women, and these issues are incorporated into the curriculum. To encourage high attendance among economically disadvantaged students—some of which are young mothers—the school schedule is flexible, there are no fees, parents and communities are closely involved, and there is little or no homework.
Poverty is often defined in purely economic terms, and almost always in terms of what poor people lack. But poverty is complex and woven into a larger social fabric. Small can be beautiful and small enterprise is essential for the world’s poorest people, particularly women, to earn a living. But BRAC believes big is necessary, and that the benefits of each small success can be amplified by a holistic, coordinated effort to connect them to a functioning, strengthening society.
As a communications consultant for VisionSpring, one of BRAC’s valued partners, I was amazed by the depth and scope of BRAC’s work in Bangladesh and globally. VisionSpring is a social enterprise dedicated to reducing poverty and generating opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses. Together, BRAC and VisionSpring have trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs across Bangladesh to sell VisionSpring eyeglasses to those who need them to work, earn a living, and support their families.
At VisionSpring, I was continually inspired by the pioneering spirit of BRAC’s entrepreneurs, who bring much-needed health products to those living in remote communities. I was especially moved by BRAC’s dedication to the flood relief effort in Pakistan, a tragedy around which few other organizations have mobilized or dedicated so much time and attention. When I learned that I would have the opportunity to support BRAC’s mission directly through BRAC USA, I jumped at the chance. I am delighted to be part of such a knowledgeable and committed team. I hope that my time with BRAC USA can further their efforts to foster a better world by empowering people and communities in situations of poverty.
This month, Forbes profiled BRAC partner, VisionSpring, in an article titled, "New vision for non-profits." In it, VisionSpring Founder & CEO Jordan Kassalow discusses how the organization’s model has evolved and how he intends to make the organization increasingly self-sustaining. VisionSpring is a social enterprise dedicated to reducing poverty and generating opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses.
To become a self-sustaining organization that is independent of philanthropic dollars, VisionSpring partnered with BRAC in 2005 to begin scaling the sale of their eyeglasses through BRAC’s network of entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. In 2009, VisionSpring and BRAC signed a Memorandum of Understanding to formally launch the scaling throughout BRAC’s network of Shastha Shebikas, or Community Health Workers.
Helen Coster of Forbes writes, “Kassalow figured BRAC's 80,000-strong sales force could help him scale up faster while saving money on training and administrative costs.” Since the beginning of this partnership, BRAC’s entrepreneurs have sold nearly 100,000 eyeglasses and have reduced the cost of the program to VisionSpring.
While this partnership cannot make VisionSpring’s model entirely self-sustaining on its own, the BRAC entrepreneurs have dramatically propelled the VisionSpring mission: getting affordable eyeglasses to those who need them to live fulfilling, productive lives.
