BRAC at 50: reflecting on 50 years of BRAC contributions to development knowledge and practice

ABSTRACT

As a Global South NGO from Bangladesh that has become one of the world’s largest NGOs, BRAC's fiftieth anniversary was a momentous occasion for global development. This special issue celebrates BRAC’s contributions to development knowledge and practice across five decades, highlighting BRAC’s impact – and the challenges it has faced in achieving this – across several programs, ranging from humanitarian response to women’s and young people’s empowerment and its quest for inclusive poverty reduction in Bangladesh and beyond. We explore how BRAC's heavy investment in a culture of continuous learning enables the organisation to understand and improve its programs, ground these in local contexts and communities, and build external partnerships for spreading its impact, influence, and knowledge globally. We hope this special issue will advance understanding of and spread BRAC’s strategies of working closely with poor and marginalised communities, of investing in transformative learning that starts with the self, of evolving and embracing mistakes, and of igniting hope over fate and despair.

The year 2022 marked the golden jubilee of BRAC. What started as an attempt of volunteers – many of whom were freedom fighters who joined the peoples’ War of Liberation of Bangladesh – participating in the restructuring of the post-war country 50 years ago is now a household name in Bangladesh, with growing presence and recognition beyond. Widely recognised as one of the world’s largest non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based in the Global South, BRAC’s programs and approaches to development demand attention from researchers, development organisations, and governments around the world. In ever-changing, complex, and challenging national and global contexts, how did the Southern NGO achieve this feat? How has it evolved over the years? And what lessons does the organisation offer to the rest of the world?

In this special issue of Development in Practice, we take a deep dive into five decades of BRAC’s key contributions to development thinking and practice through academic and critical praxis lenses. Each of the eight articles reflects on a particular topic within the broader theme of BRAC and its philosophy, successes, and challenges. We first briefly introduce the themes of the articles, before building on them to conclude the Editorial with a deeper reflection on BRAC’s identity as a learning organisation and its continuous investment and commitment to development knowledge and practice. In doing so, we centre the issue of knowledge and ways of learning in the BRAC story. From the start, BRAC has invested heavily in an organisational culture that promotes learning. We reflect on the benefits of and challenges with this philosophy and on BRAC's experiences in learning internally in rigorous and independent ways.

An exemplar of this BRAC philosophy is Polli Shomaj, a community-based rural women’s civil society organisation that brings together women who are poor for their political, social, and economic empowerment. The evolution of the Polli Shomaj program is the focus of Nayma Qayum, Mirza Hassan, and Syeda Salina Aziz’s article “Achieving gender equality through challenging social norms: BRAC’s Polli Shomaj program” (2024). The authors trace how the program was guided by the knowledge that BRAC accumulated in its formative years of how gender, class, and politics are interwoven in the social fabric of rural Bangladesh, resulting in various complex power structures. Over time, the authors show how BRAC adapted the program in response to various constraints, both from the supply side,in terms of changing donor priorities, and from the demand side, in terms of the country's changing socio-political landscape. Its current focus on violence (especially against women and girls) and creating awareness of social and legal rights is a result of this shift.

Polli Shomaj is not the only BRAC program to focus on women’s empowerment. In their article “Quiet revolution? Women’s collective empowerment and BRAC”, Sohela Nazneen, Maheen Sultan, and Nobonita Chowdhury explore the evolution of four selected BRAC programs that rely on women’s groups as a central mechanism for empowerment (2024). While BRAC has always prioritised explicitly addressing women’s needs, the authors’ analysis of the four programs shows how BRAC has vacillated between the individual and collective empowerment of women. The pragmatic choices it has had to make in the face of shifts in funding structures and backlash from local actors in favour of patriarchal norms ensured organisational sustainability but limited the room for women’s collective empowerment.

BRAC's openness to learn and improve and its central focus on the power of communities also helped the organisation to develop some of the the most successful public health programs in the Global South. In his viewpoint, "Innovating new frontiers in health service delivery and evidence generation", Ahmed Mushtaque Raza Chowdhury uses three case studies – oral rehydration therapy to prevent deaths from diarrhea, reading glasses for the elderly, and treating tuberculosis – to show how BRAC used an iterative, bottom-up learning approach to develop innovative, elegant, low-cost, simple solutions to effectively address these complex pubic health challenges.

Alongside women, another critical segment of the population in Bangladesh requiring specific attention is its young people. With a large youth population, the country benefits from a low ratio of dependent to working age population, opening up the possibility of a “demographic dividend” that can catalyse economic prosperity if this resource base can be engaged in productive employment during this window of opportunity. National statistics, however, highlight that Bangladesh may not seize this opportunity effectively. Bangladesh’s youth (aged 15–29) unemployment rate is disproportionately high compared to its national rate and almost 30 per cent of young people are neither in employment, education, or training (NEET) (BBS 2017). Even those who are working find themselves stuck in a low-skill, low-wage cycle. Existing skills training programs for young people have brought only marginal returns.

To address this issue, BRAC’s Skills Development Program (SDP) initiated, among others, the Skills Training for Advancing Resources (STAR) and Promoting Incubation Support to Enterprises (PROMISE) projects. In the article “Building an equitable future: BRAC’s STAR program and young women’s economic empowerment in Bangladesh”, Nicola Banks, Nusrat Jahan, Tasmiah Rahman, Asma Tabassum, Joydeep Sinha Roy, and Shifur Rahman Shakil examine how STAR – in contrast to traditional active labour market programs for youth employment that ignore the informal and deeply social nature of labour markets – improves skills and employment outcomes by offering on-the-job apprenticeships and promotes decent work and social inclusion by integrating young women into the marketplace (2024). However, they also highlight that these short-term benefits are diluted over the longer-term as Bangladesh’s patriarchal norms and practices pull young women away from the labour market and towards family responsibilities and commitments. Maintaining the positive impacts of the programs like STAR, they conclude, requires constant renegotiation, investment, and advocacy to challenge the structural obstacles within households, labour markets, and national policies that disadvantage women in the labour market.

Tahsina Naz Khan, Anindita Bhattacharjee, Narayan Das, Marzuk Hossain, Atiya Rahman, and Asma Tabassum in their article “The impact of entrepreneurship training and credit on the labour market outcomes of disadvantaged young people”, focuses on PROMISE, which offers classroom and on-the-job entrepreneurship training, loans, and follow-up support to disadvantaged young people in Bangladesh (2024). The authors illustrate the possibilities of PROMISE to help Bangladeshi youth realise their untapped potential. Evaluation results highlight a shift from wage labour to self-employment alongside increases in employment and impact; these impacts are all the more pronounced in women participants. The additional impact of the program’s loan component further increases income significantly.

BRAC launched the Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) program in 2002 to support those living in extreme poverty to break out of it. BRAC designed this holistic graduation approach based on its deep, on-the-ground learning of the unique challenges faced by extreme- or ultra-poor people and the approach soon proved to be successful and scaled up globally. In their viewpoint, “Globalising Southern approaches to reducing extreme poverty: Policy adoption of BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra-Poor Graduation Program”, Syed M Hashemi and Aude de Montesquiou discuss how this unique Southern approach to poverty reduction gained global recognition and became a global public good (2024). In their discussion, they remark on the vital role that protracted efforts and strong partnerships with the North, especially the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and Ford Foundation, played in globalising the graduation knowledge. Thanks to BRAC, there are currently over 250 graduation and graduation-type economic inclusion programs in 75 countries, reaching an estimated 92 million people.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic had catastrophic impacts on Bangladesh’s progress in poverty reduction. Many vulnerable non-poor people – those with income above the upper poverty line, but below the national median income before COVID-19 – fell below the poverty line during the pandemic. In response, BRAC launched the “New Poor” program, providing business planning assistance and loans to the COVID-induced new poor. In their article entitled “Economic recovery of the new poor created by COVID-19: evidence from Bangladesh”, Mohima Gomes, Tanvir Shatil, Nusrat Jahan, Nabila Tahsin, Narayan C. Das, and Imran Matin delve into the effectiveness of this emergency response program (2024).

The authors elucidate how BRAC’s extensive experience and knowledge of rural Bangladesh provided the groundwork for it to rapidly, yet effectively, identify those who had suffered the greatest losses as a result of the pandemic and to design and implement a timely intervention based on a holistic understanding of the multi-dimensional vulnerabilities of the “new poor”. This has important lessons for policy and programs aiming to support post-disaster livelihood recovery. Though the program encouraged women’s participation in income-generating activities and their rate of employment significantly increased, their income did not. Given this paper is based on a short-term evaluation, these results may change in the long-term. The pre-existing gender constraints observed in Banks et al.’s paper on STAR could also be playing a strong role here and, together with Nazneen et al.’s paper, this points towards a need for rethinking BRAC’s approach to gender empowerment.

While BRAC is perhaps best recognised for its poverty reduction and broader development initiatives, its coordinated efforts in humanitarian response are also significant. This is notable from a historic and a contemporary perspective given its leadership in responding to Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee crisis and its international experiences. How BRAC’s humanitarian work offers important insights into debates around the “humanitarian-development nexus” and the “localisation” of humanitarian aid is the topic of Sophie Roborgh, Nicola Banks, Mohammed Akramul Islam, K.A.M. Morshed and Jerome Oberreit’s article “BRAC in Bangladesh and beyond: bridging the humanitarian–development nexus through localisation” (2024). By offering a historic approach to understanding BRAC’s organisational development, the authors explore how its deep roots in the Bangladeshi community have allowed it to respond with agility to emergencies without sacrificing its pursuit of longer-term developmental objectives. These experiences, including some of the challenges that BRAC has faced taking its experience and approach internationally, add valuable lessons for both theory and practice when it comes to the development–humanitarian nexus and the localisation agenda. While development and humanitarian action continue to be largely viewed and operationalised independently of one another, BRAC is unique in bringing these two together, employing localised solutions, using its deep local knowledge to ensure sustainable, long-term benefits to affected people and communities.

BRAC as a learning organisation

The aforementioned articles provide a multitude of distinct and important perspectives on diverse BRAC programs and operations. Yet the story of 50 years of BRAC is not just about what the organisation has achieved. It is also about how BRAC has achieved it and this is commonly overlooked in academic explorations of its programs and impact. Central to BRAC’s philosophy since inception has been to ask how it can learn internally in rigorous and independent ways and how it can build a culture of continuous learning. How can it find the right blend of learning from tacit, informal, and formal sources and practices on an ongoing basis? Underpinning the measurable successes of BRAC’s global development efforts is a long and unique history that is less recognised but equally critical to capture: its deep-rooted identity as a learning organisation, which plays a central role in BRAC’s ability to identify opportunities, adapt to challenges and changes, and to shape its successes and trajectories.

The collection of articles here all share a fundamental element – an obsession with learning. Through building and integrating knowledge within and across programs and departments, the organisation fosters a culture of continuous learning with a steadfast focus on capacity and knowledge enhancement. BRAC is dedicated to evaluating its programs, often independently and through diverse mixed methods that range from small and qualitative studies to large and quantitative surveys, including randomised-control trial experiments. This is not only to prove the impact but also to uncover areas of improvement. BRAC also firmly believes in participatory learning, engaging stakeholders and including community members in the learning process to ensure that programs and interventions are responsive to local needs and priorities. Furthermore, BRAC’s philosophy embodies the tenet that failures are a cornerstone for learning and growth, enabling the organisation to reflect on and identify lessons learned. Often BRAC starts with testing competing ideas with a focus on effectiveness; the best ideas are then taken up for routinising processes and systems. This enduring culture of learning, adaptation, and innovation has proved to be the crucial means by which BRAC pursues its mission of empowering millions of individuals living in poverty and the margins of society to better their lives.

How do you promote an organisational culture that fosters this learning? This is a question that includes how the activities that underpin this culture are governed within the organisation. In 1975, BRAC established its Research and Evaluation Division (RED) as an independent unit within the organisation. Despite being independent, RED was at the very heart of the organisation for over 40 years before being integrated with BRAC University institutes in 2017. This department facilitated an improvement space for BRAC through building, creating, and sharing knowledge and learnings from its studies into and across BRAC’s programs.

While the drive for BRAC research is frequently rooted in the need to make programs effective, its focus has always been much deeper than evaluation. Investing in formative research since its earliest days has provided deep insight into the social, economic, political, and environmental contexts in which its programs take place, identifying the needs of the people it aims to serve and the multi-layered challenges they face that produce and reproduce their poverty and vulnerability.

RED’s (1980) publication The Net: Power Structures in Ten Villages is an excellent example of this type of enquiry. Against a backdrop of large-scale governmental and non-governmental relief efforts during the 1974 famine, BRAC realised that a much deeper understanding of local power and politics was necessary to explain the distribution and outcomes of these efforts. Using mixed-methods research that spoke to landless people, local elite, and government officials in each village, this study revealed the complex power dynamics that meant relief efforts were not reaching the poor and landless. A small number of powerful men with close connections to local government officials were controlling and retaining these resources. This identification of the complex “net” of networks that allowed the elite to gain control over local and external resources was a core learning that helped BRAC achieve its current scope and scale. As Abed Bhai (in RED, 1986) wrote in 1980:

The powerlessness of the poor to withstand the machination of the rural elite appears to be the primary constraint to development and social change. Without the resolution of the problems of power, genuine development in rural Bangladesh will continue to elude us.

This early research has enabled BRAC to shape its programmatic response in ways that overcome these deep-rooted structural obstacles, including, for example, building roles for local elites into specific programs (such as the Ultra-Poor Graduation program) to counteract these political dynamics, influences, and adverse practices.

BRAC has always believed in blending different kinds of knowing and has been able to use this knowledge to influence national and global agendas. RED's establishment in 1975 exemplifies BRAC’s commitment to systematic and ongoing research using formal methods. RED has always focused on developing the skills to apply the latest research methods to generate insights and evidence from BRAC’s work. In the last 15 years, a wave of randomised-control trials (RCTs) across the BRAC portfolio has generated hard evidence of the magnitude and sustainability of its programs, catapulting BRAC to the centre stage of global agendas around economic inclusion (as Hashemi and de Montesquiou look at in more detail in this issue).

BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) program exemplifies the role of rigorous evaluation in the global scale up of one of few proven “effective” models for working with the extreme poor. After the program was initiated in Bangladesh in 2002, a large-scale longitudinal RCT was introduced in 2007 to evaluate its impact in collaboration with economists at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). This early effort of conducting a rigorous “gold-standard” impact evaluation in collaboration with external academic partners has not only evidenced the program’s positive impacts. It has also played a significant role in the subsequent scale up of the UPG model, which has led to global recognition of the graduation approach as a model for addressing extreme poverty, one that is replicated in many parts of the world.

If BRAC’s learning philosophy and culture were critical to its remarkable successes in Bangladesh, it is no surprise that BRAC’s international growth has taken its knowledge ambitions to the global stage. However, BRAC’s growing contributions to development thinking and practice have given rise to questions and challenges to the “independence” of this knowledge and learning. BRAC’s decision to dissolve RED and integrate its functions into the specialised institutes of BRAC University in 2017 was a reflection of the organisation’s quest for greater independence of knowledge. BRAC also believes that these institutions are better equipped to transform knowledge into action-oriented, rigorous, and credible research to contribute to global knowledge streams through a praxis-oriented approach.

Moving its research expertise into the specialised knowledge centres of BRAC University is also a way to ensure that the degrees and training programs offered by the university are rooted in practice and practical solutions and that BRAC University students have access to BRAC learnings. As a social research institute focused on improving development and governance outcomes, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) plays a central role here, along with the BRAC Institute of Educational Development and BRAC James P. Grant School of Public Health.

Despite this independence, however, these institutions – and, of course, BRAC University itself – belong to the larger BRAC family. Thus, questioning or criticism remains as to whether research and evaluation from within BRAC can be sufficient to deepen and extend global knowledge and agendas. Can there be rigorous and independent learning within organisations? This is certainly something that many of the reviewers of articles submitted to this special issue asked implicitly or explicitly, challenging what made publications more than “a puff piece” or asking us to reflect on the implication of relying “only” on BRAC’s own research and data when creating knowledge that contributes to global development agendas. How can organisations learn – or share those learnings – if it is not “enough” to take these processes seriously internally?

If learning for its own internal improvement is BRAC’s primary goal, then perhaps criticisms like these are diluted. And often indeed, this drives BRAC’s motivation for research. But BRAC’s ambition and belief in its research stretches far beyond internal learning and improvement. By nature and design, many BRAC programs have generated deep and multi-disciplinary understanding across major development issues with national and global relevance. This knowledge has contributions to academic fields and debates but also, with the weight of BRAC and its expertise behind it, great policy influence (cf. Rahman et al. 2021). The multiple external partnerships that BRAC has built with respected international research institutes – including LSE, the University of Manchester, New York University, the University of Sussex, Innovations for Poverty Action, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), to name but a few – has been one conscious strategy to ensure greater independence and to build a bigger outreach for its contributions to this broader global development discourse and practice.

BRAC’s investments in these partnerships – particularly in the large-scale evaluations that have been achieved through these – have been hugely valuable, as we reflect above. But BRAC is also aware of the trade-offs between independent and formal vs. internal and sometimes informal research. While evidencing the impact and potential generalisability of program impacts, the former learning methodology is hugely time-consuming and expensive. Internal research and learning, on the other hand, is much less time- and resource-consuming and can produce valuable insights for continuous learning and for the improvement of BRAC and its programs. That is why BRAC has invested, and continues to invest, so heavily in internal research, employing diverse qualitative and quantitative methods based on the program and study’s needs and feasibility, first through RED and now through the BRAC University institutes. Through these extensive investments in internal research, BRAC has generated a wealth of knowledge and learning – tacit, implicit, programmatic, management, and contextual (personal, social, and political) – that would be hard (if not impossible) to generate through formal, independent research. Given BRAC’s scale and effectiveness as an international NGO based in the Global South, these informal, internal insights can be invaluable to the development community.

The shift of research into BRAC University has expanded this by investing heavily in academics and the next generation of development professionals and researchers through its praxis-oriented approach. For those of us celebrating ten years of progress at BRAC University’s BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), this is perhaps our most exciting but challenging frontier: maintaining the learning-oriented focus of BRAC while pursuing academic rigour and independence. Universities are part of a global knowledge architecture that prioritises and privileges certain types of contribution and agenda. As part of decolonising agendas, there must be a focus on recognising and creating new incentive structures that look beyond publications so that these reflect the priorities and realities of a more diverse range of universities across the globe.

The BRAC story, then, is also the story of the 50 years of ongoing and immersive organisational learning that has gone into its successes. It is 50 years of deep respect for learning from low-income and marginalised groups that feed into the design of multi-dimensional programs challenging the interlinked social and economic obstacles they face. With its huge success in adapting and scaling up its programs across the Global South, ultimately, the BRAC story is in the eyes of the millions of households that it has supported in Bangladesh and beyond and in its dedication to rising to the new and emerging challenges that Bangladesh faces, such as the Rohingya refugee crisis and climate change. And the story will continue as BRAC continues this groundbreaking work to forge new paths to breaking down barriers and improving lives. The BRAC story will continue in its modesty of knowing that the hard work is never done: the deepest structural obstacles are the hardest to overcome, but we must continue to work towards this goal, investing in the learning and advocacy processes that can underpin success in these directions.

Since its inception, people occupied the centre stage of the BRAC story. It is a story of people who are poor and marginalised, a story of learning, evolving, and embracing mistakes, a story of progress, and a story of igniting hope over fate and despair. We hope this special issue of Development in Practice will spread that story, from Bangladesh to the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.