Who We Are

“BRAC is the world’s largest development organisation and is doing tremendous work impacting the lives of millions. BRAC is making a significant contribution to Bangladesh, making huge leaps forward in meeting the Millennium Development Goals.”

- Subinay Nandy, Country Director, China, United Nations Development Programme
 

What is BRAC?

Founded in Bangladesh in 1972, BRAC is a development organisation dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the poor to bring about changes in their own lives.

Over the course of our evolution, we have established ourselves as a pioneer in recognising and tackling the many different realities of poverty.

More on the history and evolution of BRAC

Our Priorities

• Focus on Women - We work with poor women, who are the worst affected by poverty. But who, if empowered with the right tools, can play a crucial role in bringing about changes within their families and their communities. Over 98% of our membership is female; and more than 95% of our volunteer cadres - health volunteers, paralegal trainers, agriculture, livestock and poultry extension workers and school teachers - are women.
   
• Organising the Poor - Organising the poor is at the heart of our work. Our Village Organisations (VOs) _  each with 30-40 women _ act as platforms for poor women to come together, access services such as microfinance, exchange information and raise awareness on  social, legal and other issues concerning their daily lives. As a group, these women _ who as individuals have little or no voice in decision-making within their homes or their communities _ are able to speak out and influence change.
   
• Unleashing Human Potential - We believe in unleashing human potential. BRAC acts as a catalyst presenting a multitude of opportunities - both economic and social - that allows poor families to transform their own lives and futures. Everything we do is in response to the needs of disadvantaged people who are marginalised, and excluded from mainstream development. BRAC is for such people - who are poor for a lack of opportunities, not potential.
   
• Comprehensive Approach - We believe that there are many underlying causes of poverty, and these causes are interlinked. In order for the poor to come out of poverty, they must have the tools to fight it across all fronts. We have, therefore, developed support services in areas of human rights, legal aid, education, health care, social and economic empowerment, finance and enterprise development, agriculture, environmental sustainability and disaster preparedness.

Our Strengths

• Thinking local, acting global - We were conceived in the aftermath of war in one of the poorest countries in the world that is frequently wracked by natural disasters. With our roots strongly placed at the heart of poverty, we have first-hand insight and experience necessary to understand its many faces, and develop effective and innovative tools to help tackle them. We live and work within households and communities, but operate our successful interventions at national levels to maximise their impact. We have developed a culture of knowledge-sharing, which has enabled us to extend proven techniques and best practices across geographical barriers. We currently work in 9 countries across Asia and Africa.
   
• Increasingly self-reliant - Self reliance is a key theme at BRAC, both for those we support as well as ourselves. From our inception nearly four decades ago as a fully donor-funded relief project, we have come to be over 70% self-financed, which is no small feat considering our annual budget of nearly USD 535 million. We have achieved this level of self-reliance not only through built-in measures to ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness across all your programmes, but also by innovating the concept of social enterprises. Our social enterprises, ranging from agriculture to handicrafts, are strategically connected to our development programmes and form crucial chain linkages that increase the productivity of our members’ assets and labour, while reducing the risks of their businesses. The surplus generated from these enterprises are fed back into our development programmes that help to make us increasingly self-reliant.
   
• Unprecedented Scale and Reach - "Small is beautiful, but big is necessary" - Fazle Hasan Abed, BRAC Founder and Chairperson. Working in countries where the poor number in the tens of millions, we cannot afford to be satisfied with small-scale projects. We are specialists in taking an idea, testing it, perfecting it and then expanding it rapidly to national scale cost-effectively and without compromising quality. Today, BRAC is the largest development organisation in the world in terms of its reach _ its tuberculosis programme alone covers a population of over 80 million people in Bangladesh. We are also the largest in terms of staff size, employing more than 60,000 people, and organising and training an additional 60,000 self-employed health volunteers, agriculture and livestock extension agents and part-time teachers. Across the world, our staff and our volunteers together reach an estimated 110 million people.
   
• Proven Track Record - We are a major contributor to the development success story of Bangladesh - a country on track to meet the majority of the millennium development goals and join the ranks of middle income countries. In a short span of time, we have also grown to become a leading development organisation in all the other countries in which we are working. We are the development partner of choice for most donor agencies and governments.