When I was a student in college, I wanted to be a development economist. My initial inspiration came from learning about BRAC’s rural development programs in Bangladesh in the 1970s/80s and I went on to write my senior thesis investigating mission drift in microfinance institutions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to do a PhD in economics and eventually settled for another career path.

A few years ago, however, I had the opportunity to visit Bangladesh for the first time on a work trip and reconnected with some folks working in the development space there. I also got the chance to speak with Selim Hussain and some of his team from BRAC Bank, which was a very interesting meeting. Today, BRAC is ubiquitous in Bangladesh and has positively impacted millions of lives, although it has had its fair share of challenges over the years.

For those interested in the story of BRAC and its late founder Fazle Hasan Abed, I thought I might highlight a recent book by Scott MacMillan titled “Hope Over Fate.” The author, who previously worked as a speechwriter for Abed, considers him the most influential person most people have never heard of (the other candidate for that title is perhaps Norman Borlaug, whose work I also learned about in college from my thesis advisor). 

Scott MacMillan appeared on the Asia Foundation podcast to discuss some stories from his book (link here). I have included some of my own paraphrased notes below. Please note these are for personal reference only and any mistakes in transcription are my own.

Abed was the founder of BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. That acronym is no longer applicable. Today, BRAC has ~100,000 employees, it is no longer just Bangladeshi (they work in about a dozen countries) and they are no longer working in just rural areas either. The short version of the story is that BRAC has played a very large role in the transformation of Bangladesh from one of the poorest countries in the world to a paragon of development, with many quality of life indicators now better than neighboring India and Pakistan.

Back in the 1970s, however, Bangladesh was a remarkable place for all the wrong reasons. It was the second poorest country in the world and under-five mortality was 250 per 1000 live births (25% of people born did not live to see their 5th birthday). There was a moment of jubilation following the liberation war of 1971 but it went down downhill from there. A famous quote about Bangladesh from that time is often attributed to Henry Kissinger; one of the state department officials said to him it would be a basket case as soon as it was born, to which he replied “but not our basket case.” The world, and the west especially, had washed its hands of Bangladesh and things went into a rapid spiral, including a large famine in 1974/75. This was the broader context in which BRAC was born.

Abed began working in a remote corner of northern Bangladesh in the 1970s. What he had found was that it wasn’t so much that people lacked money (although they did), but there was this poverty of hope or fatalism among the people struggling with poverty and the more moneyed classes. The view was that poverty is just something that is ordained by a higher power, it is with us like the sun, the moon and the tides. Abed started working with small groups of landless people and what he found was even when there was a sudden positive shock (e.g. a gift of assets, like goats or money), it was very common for people to slide back into the poverty trap unless you were able to somehow address that prevailing mindset of fatalism. The road from there on would involve giving people real services to improve their lives, things that had been previously denied to them, such as credit, skills training, provision of agricultural inputs, access to healthcare etc. But none of that would mean anything if people did not first believe in the possibility of change.

In the 1970s, BRAC did a fascinating series of studies. They hired ethnographers and anthropologists to go into rural areas and live there for a very long time, asking one series of open ended questions after another. For instance, when resources come into the village in the form of food aid, where do these resources go? The subtitle of one of these studies was “Who gets what and why?” What they found was no matter aid would come into the village, the local elites would always find a way to take it for themselves at the expense of the landless and most marginalized people. There was this very corrupt nexus of landlords, moneylenders operating in cahoots with the police and criminal elements. One of the studies shed light about this network of local corruption that was very hard to see for outsiders coming in, but it kept people in a state of exploitation.

There was an incident that happened in 1974 when Abed tried to expand into a new area and he ran into a local political boss who wanted his cut of the action. Abed said no, pulled up sticks and left. But that was maybe the moment where he thought BRAC would have to become a force to be reckoned with if it wanted to really make a difference in the county and in order to do that, it would have to become very large. That’s when he developed his mantra, in response to a book by the economist Schumacher called “Small is Beautiful.” Abed said “small is beautiful, but big is necessary.” If you are going to confront a problem like poverty, which is huge and multifaceted, then you need programs that are huge and multifaceted. That’s what set BRAC apart. Some organizations get big doing just one thing but for Abed it was never enough just to do one thing, because you solve one problem and another one emerges.

For example, if a woman got a loan to buy a cow, you also worked on improving the market for milk so she could sell it an affordable price to pay back the loan. There had to be cooling stations built and a system of milk collectors to take milk to the cooling systems and an infrastructure to take milk into the cities, package it and sell it. Abed ended up doing all of that and ended up building practically the entire dairy industry based on the idea that women who had previously been landless or assetless who now had a cow deserve to be able to sell their milk at an affordable price.

Despite its success, there were a lot of setbacks, even when BRAC became very large. One story that comes to mind is Abed wanted to upend the rural power structure in Bangladesh. He developed this idea of giving landless people access to water rights by drilling them deep tube wells, so the landowners would buy water from the landless people and this would give them a resource they could call their own. The elites had already captured the land and credit, but here was one thing landless people could have for themselves. It didn’t work, it was a total failure. Abed said it failed because the landless people would sign deals with the landowners (offering to water their land for say 20% of the crop). But the landowners would harvest the crop and then renege on the deal and there was nothing the landless people could do to enforce those contracts.

A quick story on BRAC’s anti-diarrhea program – the biggest killer of children under 5 was diarrheal dehydration and the cure for that was literally a simple solution. It was a precise mixture of water, sugar and salt, all ingredients that were commonly available in the villages. But you had to mix it properly and administer to the child in a certain way. Abed had already been working with landless rural women for a long time and thought if he could just teach everybody to memorize the recipe and how to make it, he could save a lot of lives. He developed a system of mobile teams of trainers who went door to door across the countryside, teaching people how to make oral rehydration solutions. There was a set of incentives through which trainers were paid based on how much of the knowledge was retained 30 days later. In the end, 13 million mothers were reached and it is still held up as a case study in mass behavior change.

Who is this book for? There are a lot of wonky development books out there filled with acronyms and jargon and he didn’t want to write another one. This book is for anyone who wants to understand what social change can really look like but wants the narrative as well, as Abed had a remarkable life.