BRAC: A Laboratory for Systemic Solutions

IN THE UNITED STATES, Silicon Valley has become synonymous with innovation. We are currently riding a wave of creative responses to some of the world’s most intractable problems, led by many different actors from a variety of backgrounds. New innovations are being developed at exponential rates, but experimentation to produce technological advances still needs practical application and field-testing to assess whether something new is even useful. Halfway around the world, a leading Bangladeshi service provider known as BRAC has been doing exactly this—since 1975.

Social entrepreneurs are at the forefront of testing both processes and technological innovations on the ground. In the spirit of many initiatives that start small then scale up, social enterprises typically produce small, short-term changes with effects that ripple through existing systems, thereby catalyzing big changes over the long term. Some organizations seek to address challenges by inventing a technical solution, others innovate by addressing systemic barriers at a societal level. However, the characteristic shared by social entrepreneurship initiatives that both achieve a large scale and are transformative at a societal level is an emphasis on experiential learning by individuals and the organization (Alvord et al 2003).

An example of a technical solution is the distribution of water pumps in rural settings. Development organizations have funded thousands of water pump models over the years to bring clean water to rural populations. Yet insufficient knowledge of socio-economic situations or cultural settings resulted in the failure of getting pumps to communities in need. Indeed, despite the availability of a technology, years of research have found that the presence of a technology doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the population it is meant to serve will have access to it.

Rooted in the philosophies of Amartya Sen and Paolo Friere, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)—one of the world’s largest NGOs—believes that the lack of universal access to such basic things as water constitute a failure in the market that limits the poor from accessing basic services and earning a living wage. In response, BRAC creates multiple entrepreneurial opportunities along the entire value chain to address underlying inequities inherent in the market economy...

Sir Fazle Abed, a former corporate executive with Shell, established BRAC in 1972. Though it started out in response to
Bangladesh’s Liberation War and the resettling of refugees returning from India, its mission evolved into that of empowering
people and communities by alleviating situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease and social injustice. Its innovative approach grounded in social entrepreneurialism succeeds in addressing some underlying causes of poverty in a manner unlike many other development organizations. By applying a holistic framework to the alleviation of poverty, systemic issues surrounding class and caste are more easily dismantled.

BRAC takes a societal-level approach, developing interventions intended to achieve scale and affect positive changes
by enabling individuals to realize their potential. BRAC focused its work on women and children, who are traditionally
the most vulnerable, recognizing that women, as the primary caregivers, would ensure both the education of their
children and the inter-generational sustainability of their families and households (BRAC 2010). Because of this orientation, the empowerment of women and the education and health of children is at the core of BRAC’s mission.

In addition to the provision of micro-credit, BRAC owns an array of pro-poor commercial enterprises strategically linked
to its development programs. Recognizing the numerous barriers that restrict the poor from participating fully in the market, BRAC does not rely only on loans. Instead, it developed interventions along the whole supply chain - both upstream and downstream - that maximize benefits to the poor.

For example, in the agricultural sector, BRAC works with low-income women in poultry, livestock, fisheries, sericulture,
crop farming and social forestry. Within each of these sub-sectors, BRAC has designed an integrated set of services,
including training in improved production techniques, provision of improved breeds and technologies, supply of technical
assistance and inputs, organizing participatory farmer experiments with new technologies, and marketing of finished
goods (BRAC 2010). These interventions are located along theentire value chain at critical points where the poor typically
have trouble accessing services or achieving competitiveness.

BRAC realized that the effective design and implementation of its programs would require evidence-based research. From
the beginning, it took a very unpopular approach considering that many organizations which generate public goods start out as donor dependent. Specifically, rather than submitting a glowing report highlighting initial successes to its donors,
BRAC told of sobering lessons learned from disappointing results. It recognized that success would only be realized by creating strategies based upon the realities on the ground. Three years after BRAC was founded, it set up its own independent Research and Evaluation Unit, well before such a thing became the standard. This group provides the analytical research needed to improve existing programs and offers direction on new avenues of development based on field experiences.

BRAC’s organizational structure forces it to take a critical look at failures in a systematic way. Feedback mechanisms inform programs by leveraging the knowledge of its staff and beneficiaries to make continual improvements. David Korten, author of “When Corporations Rule the World,” referred to BRAC “as near to a pure example of a learning organization as one is likely to find.” By design BRAC is structured as a learning organization that seeks to transform the society in which it operates. As a counterpoint to the innovations occurring in the sterile labs of Palo Alto, California, BRAC’s research unit serves as its own innovative model. Here BRAC finds solutions to development challenges within a real world laboratory of ideas.

Kirsten Spainhower is an Operations Officer at the World Bank. 

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BRAC...believes that the lack of universal access to such basic things as water constitute a failure in the market that limits the poor from accessing basic services and earning a living wage.