BRAC Uganda wins the Gold Social Performance Management Award

With global recognition that microfinance institutions should be placing emphasis on social as well as financial goals, the Association of Microfinance Institutions of Uganda (AMFIU) gathered representatives from microfinance institutions across the country for the first Social Performance Management Awards on September 27, 2011. This aimed to create awareness and promote social performance management across Uganda’s microfinance industry and to identify whether microfinance service providers are meeting their individual goals of poverty reduction and empowerment.

A number of microfinance institutions were recognized for their efforts in integrating social performance management into their operations. After the bronze and silver awards were distributed, Khondoker Ariful Islam, Country Representative of BRAC Uganda was called to accept the only Gold Award for “Outstanding Recognition in Implementing Social Performance Management”. While through its partnership with the MasterCard Foundation, BRAC has emerged as the largest and fastest-growing microfinance providers in Uganda, this Award reinforces BRAC's commitment towards maintaining its focus on social performance and poverty alleviation.

The audience warmly received his heartfelt speech that touched upon the successes and challenges that BRAC Uganda has experienced in Social Performance Management, and stressed that above all, BRAC’s achievements are based upon our role as a learning organization, that through its coordinated system of program management, monitoring, auditing and research departments strives to learn everything about our microfinance programs - including what works, as well as what doesn’t. Only this way, he said, can we be confident that as an organization we are meeting our target clients of poor rural and urban women, as well as being aware of and responsive to the needs of our over 100,000 borrowers across the country.

The speech was particularly poignant, considering the Mr. Islam would be soon departing Uganda to take over as the Country Representative of BRAC Afghanistan. As the Country Representative Mr.Islam had played an instrumental role in launching BRAC Uganda - growing it to become one of the largest microfinance institutions in the country. In a span of four years, BRAC Uganda has disbursed more than $71 million in loans through its network of 94 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 organization in the country, employing more than 1,800 people and touching the lives of 1.8 million poor people in Uganda.

AMFIU, the Commissioner of Microfinance, and representatives of other MFI’s thanked him for the huge contributions that BRAC has made in Uganda under his leadership over the past six years, changing the microfinance landscape in scale, poverty outreach, and reputation. Although secretly hoping that he would take up one of the many offers he has had for Ugandan citizenship, the team at BRAC Uganda are immensely proud of him and wish him the best as he takes his many strengths of leadership, honesty and dedication to Afghanistan.

BRAC’s MEJNIN Seminar

A huge number of media photographers piled into a seminar arranged by BRAC’s Safe Citizenship for Adolescent Girls Programme, “MEJNIN” on the September 13th, 2011. Due to the congestion caused by press personnel, it was difficult to spot the notable guests. The seminar was a closing event for the pilot MEJNIN Programme, which was initiated experimentally by BRAC’s Gender Justice and Diversity Unit last year. The program targets adolescent girls, and helps them build relationships with their parents and teachers, allowing them to effectively share their difficulties regarding the phenomenon notoriously called ‘Eve teasing’.

'Eve teasing' is a form of sexual aggression that can range in severity from sexually suggestive remarks, brushing in public places, catcalls, to outright groping. This phrase that misleadingly suggests harmless and even playful behavior, has led to the death of forty Bangladeshis this year. Twelve of those killed were family members of adolescent girls facing eve teasing. Twenty-seven deaths are attributed to suicide, and most girls at this age found it terribly difficult to live on a day to day basis with this type of harassment.

As discussions continued during the seminar, it became clear that those responsible for the deaths were not only abusers and bullies, but also the parents, teachers, relatives and the society at large. It is unnerving to think of the way social constructs affect our youth. Still now, when a girl faces eve teasing on her way to school or college, she not only faces shame from strangers, but carries that responsibility for that shame with her. Questions like, ‘why do you have to laugh so much?’, ‘why didn’t you cover your hair?’ and ‘why do you have to wear that dress?’ are the expressions they are typically subjected to from their own parents. Given the percentage of suicides versus murders, it is clear that outsiders are not the only villain here. Changes are necessary from within these girls' families and the societies which harbor these notions.

This fact was exactly the focus of the MEJNIN programme which tried to create the space of comfort for the adolescents who face such harassment everyday. Director of the Gender Justice and Diversity Sheepa Hafiz in her introductory presentation mentioned how BRAC ran this programme to create this safe space successfully for 15,000 women in 60 schools of Dhaka. The education minister Mr. Nurul Islam Nahid, highlighting the importance of this space, said that he visited every family where a teenager committed suicide facing such anguish and he found out that inevitably in all those cases, when the teenager felt that her last refuge of comfort--her own family--was not receptive to her tribulations, that's when she decided to commit suicide. The seminar attendees were unanimous in agreeing that change has to come from within these groups where the basic attitude towards women is that their independence is limited by their gender.

Mili Biswas, a female police commissioner and panel member of the MEJNIN seminar, expressed how difficult it was for her when she had taken a job as a police officer 20 years ago. As the only female officer in the Police, she was constantly questioned. The recruiting of women in Police stopped for 10 years after that until it was restarted again in 1998. Now the officer ranks of Police boasts almost 200 women. She mentioned that nowadays, she could see changes occurring and they can accept more challenging and important jobs. Minister Nahid echoed her statements and said that change is a gradual and longstanding process and one only has to see the progress in the last 15 years to see how things have changed for women in Bangladesh. As gradual as these changes are, she mentioned that nothing brings change faster than economic empowerment.

The following day's programme by BRAC Adolescent Development Programme brought in a large number of women entrepreneurs at the Livelihood Seminar and was a testament to what economic empowerment can do for women. Seventy out of five hundred adolescent girls who received esthetician training from BRAC to start their own business were the participants of the event. Each girl present had a story of success to tell. Some girls could now support their families' businesses while others were able to take on the burden of paying for higher education. Just 12 days of training had changed their lives. They were each earning 15,000 to 20,000 taka a month and many were thinking about business expansion. Beauty parlours at rural centres? Who would have thought? But yet these girls sensed the opportunity and became successful entrepreneurs. The entire day they had an opportunity to talk to their role model -- the most successful female entrepreneur and beautician Kaniz Almas Khan who advised the girls and and gave them tips of the trade. They got business advice from BRAC business school professor Mr. Mamun Rashid, former head of Citibank NA and head of the centre for entrepreneurship. They even posed questions to Shameran Abed, programme head of BRAC Microfinance, on how to get more seasonal loans. By the end of the day, they were charged up, ready to get back and grow their business. By the end of the day, the programme leads in BRAC came to the conclusion that now its time to scale.

These two events are, in effect, good examples of BRAC's work in Bangladesh. Not only does BRAC work for social change and empowerment but it also provides the business tools so that even the most marginalized in the society can truly live up to their potential. Innovation + Scale = Effective change.

BRAC Founder & Chairperson talks about scaling up at CGI 2011

Watch live streaming video from cgi_breakoutseminar2 at livestream.com

Yesterday at the 2011 CGI Annual Meeting, Sir Fazle Abed, BRAC's founder and chairperson, joined the conversation on the Girls and Women track as a member of a panel discussion on scaling up, titled "What to Scale; Where to Scale". Sir Fazle was joined on the panel by Geeta Rao Gupta, Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, Jennifer Leaning, Director, FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund, and Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sweden. Remarks were made before the panel by Judith Bruce, Senior Associate and Policy Analyst at the Population Council.

One of the major points of discussion regarded the qualitative differences between scaling efforts and strategies, scaling up versus out. Dr. Geeta Rao Gupta posed the question as to whether a distinction should be placed on the strategy of bringing micro level programs and methods to the macro level, versus the strategy of replicating those micro methods across a broader and range of groups. Dr. Gupta highlighted BRAC's innovation in both models, mentioning that, "BRAC's work in Bangladesh...is actually modeled and built around scalability. [It] reaches millions of girls and women."

Sir Fazle was asked to discuss how BRAC achieved so much success in building this model. He emphasized the need to streamline programs by cutting out unnecessary or inefficient methods before attempting to replicate or expand these programs, clarifying that, "once we are effective and efficient, then we try to scale up." Throughout the discussion this point was reiterated as the integral rule to the success and organic growth of BRAC's programs and those of other broad-based NGOs.

Sir Fazle also addressed the challenges that are faced in scaling up efforts. He went on to discuss how the infrastructural demands prove to be one of the biggest challenges, stating that, "you need to have resources organized...training capacity, audit and accounting" and demonstrated the weight of statement by sharing that BRAC alone has 178 internal auditors.

The session closed with key points shared by each member of the panel. When asked to summarize his statements, Sir Fazle succinctly stated that, "there can be no better investment than on girls...we need to develop a whole new movement which [will] get us to achieve gender equality which is the unfinished agenda of this century."

Book on BRAC soon to be released!

Look for: Making Tuberculosis History: Community-based Solutions for Millions.

Like many of BRAC’s programs, its community-based model for TB has garnered much praise: it’s been profiled in articles in the New York Times, documented in Harvard Business School case studies, received the Stop TB Partnership Kochon Prize, and hosted dozens of distinguished visitors. Some of its methods have brought them under fire, within conservative communities, with the public sector, and international donors—it was one of the first to treat patients with lay volunteers (called shasthya shebikas), all women, in the community. And while medications have always been provided for free by the government, BRAC requires patients to hand over a small deposit prior to beginning treatment that’s returned only when the patient completes the six months of treatment (this can be paid by the community or waived when necessary). Shasthya shebikas watch the patients take their medications every day (a strategy now called directly observed therapy, short-course or DOTS) at their homes, receiving a small payment upon treatment completion.When pressured to change its delivery strategy, BRAC has refused, with one argument amply supported by program data and rigorous research studies: this model works. With adherence as an Achilles’ heel for treating infectious and non-communicable disease alike, BRAC found a way to engage patients and motivate them to continue the full course of treatment, defended it, and then scaled up to one of the largest programs in the world. Now a critical member in a national partnership with the Government of Bangladesh, over 40 other non-governments organizations, BRAC treats close to 100,000 patients a year with a success rate of 92%, defying the assumed trade-off between quality and scale. These achievements reflect significant contributions from many, including technical expertise from the World Health Organization and the Japanese Anti-TB Association, and resource mobilization by the Country Coordinating Mechanism, and transcend national borders.Internationally, BRAC has begun to adapt the model to new contexts. BRAC Afghanistan has worked with the government to make community-based TB treatment options part of the standard package of health services offered nationally.

Since its first write-up in a scientific newsletter in 1991, BRAC has published several academic articles on its successes in tuberculosis. It has even written chapters on the program in Tuberculosis: an interdisciplinary perspective and more recently, in From One to Many, a collection of programmatic experiences in scale up edited by BRAC. Ian Smillie dedicates a chapter of his book on BRAC, Freedom from Want, to tuberculosis control. But a thorough, reflective documentation, one capturingthe broader elements of the history, collective insights, support systems, strategic thinking, and overall, the story of what had built the program, written by its veteran leaders and staff, was absent. Finally, in Making Tuberculosis History: Community-based Solutions for Millions, we have achieved just that. The book offers a complete account of the program: how it was conceived, piloted, refined, scaled, managed, and ultimately adapted for new contexts, including Bangladesh’s rapidly growing citiesand Afghanistan’s remote mountainous regions. Summarizing past successes and current dilemmas, the book’s ultimate aim is to advance efforts to eliminate poverty and disease globally. The public health challenges facing the world today demonstrate the critical need for large-scale thinking; lessons from BRAC’s TB program can inspire others to think creatively about health delivery and advancing towards health for all.

Making Tuberculosis History will be formally launched on October 27^th at the 42^nd Union World Conference on Lung Health. All conference participants are welcome to attend. BRAC plans to hold additional book launch activities in Dhaka, New York, Boston in the coming months. Those interested in purchasing the book can find information at the University Press Limited website.

Bright Minds Towards a Brighter Future

BRAC’s holistic approach to poverty alleviation is a function of its core beliefs, and BRAC’s Education Programme in particular is an example of a development tool that promotes advancement over a lifetime. Education can be a means of transcending social class and economic boundaries as it has the power to lift future generations out of poverty and disenfranchisement. Within BRAC’s Education Programme, Medhabikash has been enabling young students to pursue higher education on an international level.

Ten bright minds sit in a conference room eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the primary catalyst in initiating their prospects for achieving higher education. The students in the room – all 18- and 19-year old females – bring both a sense of wonderment and anxiety to the conference table. The next four years of their lives will differ greatly from their humble roots, as they are all moving to India to attend two very prestigious universities situated in two urban locales. Having come from different areas of rural Bangladesh, these students share the desire to further their education, make their parents proud, and most importantly, give back to the land they came from.

The first student I spoke to, Tumpa Akhter, age 19, fears the inevitable difficulty of maintaining a valuable social life while attaining the highest marks possible. She values time management and knows this will be imperative in achieving success at Rai University, where she will be working to attain her BBA. Zafrin Sultana, age 19, tells us that her biggest worry is leaving her parents; she explains that because she is a dominant participant in taking care of the family’s cattle business, her parents will hurt a little bit during her years away from them. Although this weighs on her mind heavily, she looks to the future and assures us all that once she attains stellar marks in school, she will come back to her hometown of Malikgonj and bring her parents out of their financial hardships by working as an engineer. Another student jokingly compares the Indian food she will have to eat and her favorite Bangladeshi meals.

Although they demonstrate drive and passion through their numerous stories of struggle and hardship, these students are not your everyday young visionaries. They are all winners of the Rai Foundation Scholarship, which requires an HSC GPA of 5.0 and the drive to compete at some of the most prestigious universities in India. Three of the ten students had also achieved the “golden 5” GPA – a tremendous honor. Tumpa and four other girls will be studying to attain their BBA at Rai University, while Fariha and four of her classmates are candidates of a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) at EIILM University in Sikkim. Furthermore, upon inquiry, each student unanimously agreed that she would come back to Bangladesh to support her family by doing business or practicing engineering here. Their commitment to their people as well as their academic prowess create the perfect combination for uplifting the societies from which they came.

It is truly refreshing to see students like this prepare themselves for what will be the four most important years of their lives thus far. In addition to presenting scholarships to most worthy students, BRAC’s Medhabikash Programme assists foundations like BRAC-Rai in selecting the best candidates from Bangladesh. These students will continue on to work in fields and industries where their talents will be useful, and hopefully over the course of time, will then be able contribute in the development work of Bangladesh.

By Shams Uddin Ahmed

Shams Uddin Ahmed, Communications Intern, is a fourth year Finance student at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. USA with an interest in micro-finance and healthcare studies.

Shashthya Kormi: giving back to the community

“I became interested when I heard that this project aimed to save mothers, newborns and children. If I can save a single life of a mother or a newborn by providing health care services, it would be a great achievement for me. This will make my mother happy, and the souls of my sister and my brother will be pleased.” -Sweety Akter is a community health worker in BRAC’s maternal, neonatal and child health (MNCH) programme. At BRAC such workers are called Shashthya Kormi. They provide education and health services to pregnant and lactating women, newborns and children at home. Sweety lives in Goshaigonj, a small village in a remote rural district in north Bangladesh.

Sweety’s father, Mohammad Safiur Rahman, is a poor farmer. She is the second of four daughters. Like most traditional families her father desired a son and Sweety’s grand-parents and neighbours all blamed her mother for not having a son. To fulfill their desire her mother conceived for the fifth time and gave birth to a son. The family was overjoyed, but unfortunately this was short lived as the baby developed complications after birth which the traditional birth attendant was not able to recognize in time. The baby was taken to hospital where he died.

Read the full article here: http://www.searo.who.int/en/Section864/Section1552.htm (Health in South-East Asia, September 2011 ) [page 16-18]

This article on BRAC Shasthya Kormi (SK) has published in the Newsletters of the South- East Asia Regional Office, World Health Organization on September version. The article contains the story of a SK working in the Gaibandha district.