Assignment
The Role of Development NGOs: The BRAC Model
BRAC, previously known as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee and now as Building Resources Across Countries, is an extraordinary NGO whose mission is poverty reduction. The BRAC model illuminates how comparative advantages of NGOs can function to support poverty reduction and illustrates conditions under which NGOs extend their activities in the face of deficiencies of government and private-sector actors. BRAC was founded in the early 1970s to aid displaced persons in the aftermath of civil war and famine. The organization's leaders soon understood that the problems of the rural poor were chronic and structural, and they turned their attention to long-term development and poverty alleviation efforts. BRAC originally operated in the rural areas of Bangladesh, where government is characterized by low capacity and high corruption. In contrast, BRAC has grown steadily, attracting funds for its reputation for competence, dedication, innovativeness, accountability, and effectiveness. With tens of millions of people and some regions of Bangladesh caught in complex poverty traps, BRAC has had to innovate continuously to bring needed services to the poor. Through helping the poor identify their own needs and priorities, BRAC has developed high-impact and widely emulated program innovations in education, nutrition, health, credit, legal rights, advocacy, and other fields. By some measures, BRAC is now the largest NGO in the world. BRAC's activities contribute more than half of one percent of Bangladesh's GDP. As of 2009, BRAC had over 119,000 employees, making it the country's second-largest employer.
Just over half of BRAC employees are primary teachers in its widely emulated nonformal BRAC Education Program. While BRAC programs such as "microcredit-plus" have been widely replicated in other countries, none operate on BRAC's scale. BRAC is a complex organization, with over 8 million grassroots members (usually one woman per household) and over 6 million microfinance borrowers. These members participate in BRAC's basic units, the Village Organization (VO). There are nearly 300,000 VOs, each consisting of 35 to 50 women from a village or neighborhood. BRAC currently works in most of the country's 80,000 villages through a system of 14 training centers and over 2,800 branch offices, with a budget of approximately half a billion U.S. dollars. Once highly dependent on donors, BRAC has responded to donor demands for greater self-reliance. BRAC is now more than 70% self-supporting. The major source of its internal revenue is a growing network of productive enterprises that it has established, with the twin aims of poverty reduction and net income generation for its poverty programs. BRAC owns or co-owns and operates several small and medium-size enterprises with the explicit aim of direct or indirect poverty reduction as well as its income-generating mission. BRAC rural enterprises produce goods such as chalk, seeds, shoes, and sanitary napkins.
Although these are all classic private goods, an extended role for NGOs has emerged due to Bangladesh's often dysfunctional private sector. BRAC's activities supply needed inputs for nonformal schools and farms and more affordable basic consumer goods for local people while providing employment for poor women. Fazle Hasan Abed originally founded BRAC to provide assistance to victims of famine and displacement. Soon, however, Abed and his organization concluded that poverty was a chronic and entrenched problem, and they turned their attention to development and poverty alleviation. Abed has won international recognition for his work, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Noma Prize for Literacy, the Feinstein World Hunger Award, UNICEF's Maurice Pate Award, and the 2004 Gates Prize. Aware of the need for sustained leadership, BRAC is developing a new generation of professionals who continue to innovate in poverty alleviation programs while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of existing programs. BRAC has helped fill the vacuum sometimes left by government, taking on many of the functions of good governance-targeting public goods, providing common-pool goods, and advocating for the poor.
The influence of BRAC has been so great that a popular saying in Bangladesh is that "we have two governments," the formal government and BRAC. Despite its size, BRAC remains very flexible. When catastrophic flooding hit the country in August 2004, BRAC temporarily reassigned virtually its entire organization relief activities. The linchpin program, microfinance for the poor, started two years before Grameen (see the case study in Chapter 15). The program is targeted to individuals owning very little land and typically involved in rural nonfarm activities such as door-to-door sales and small-scale vending from their homes or markets. These women borrowers often had very little inventory because they could afford to hold little; thus their sales would be so low that they could afford no more inventory the next day. But people stuck in working-capital poverty traps may face several other types of poverty traps at the same time. Thus BRAC has designed a strategy that it calls microcredit-plus-plus to convey the scope of its interrelated village programs seeking to meet a variety of poverty reduction goals. As Ian Smillie shows, although some of the programs in credit, health, and education evolved somewhat separately, they have been packaged together effectively. In Bangladesh 30 years ago, attending school was an unimaginable luxury for most of the poor.
Even in 1990, fewer than half of all children in the country completed primary school. By 2003, about twothirds were completing school. BRAC has been one of the major driving forces in this transformation through its education program. BRAC began establishing highly innovative village nonformal primary schools in 1984, in response to the needs and requests of the village women with whom it works. A major reason that parents do not send their children to school is that their work is needed at home and on the small family farm plot to help the family survive. A second reason is the intimidation and alienation that uneducated parents and their children feel in traditional school settings. A third is harassment of girls. The program structure was developed to respond to schooling problems identified by mothers taking part in other BRAC programs. BRAC schools teach the children of poor, often landless families. Well over two-thirds of the students are girls. In the earlier years of the program, the schools typically operated for only a few hours a day so that the children can help at home and in farm or nonfarm activities. Parents decide whether classes will be held in the morning or the evening, depending on the nature of the village's needs. Little homework is assigned, as homework requirements were identified as a major stumbling block to keeping children in school.
BRAC hoped to make up for shorter school hours with a higher-quality education featuring a significantly smaller class size of about 30 to 35, engaging teaching styles, and the care shown for the pupils. The school program has grown steadily, and today there are over 1 million pupils enrolled in some 8,000 schools, with over 65,000 teachers. There are now also about 700,000 students in BRAC's pre-primary school program. Many BRAC schools have bamboo walls and a thatched roof; others are bamboo-framed, with tin sheets for walls and roof. Inside, decorations are hung from the roof. Lessons and papers are posted on the walls. The children typically sit around the periphery of the room. In addition to lessons, all are expected to participate in recitations, traditional dances, and other engaging activities. Nearly all the teachers (about 97%) are village women who are trained and supervised by professional staff. They are required to have had nine years of education, less than required by public schools but sufficient for the materials being taught. Outside evaluators of the program have concluded that the quality of teacher supervision is one of the keys to the program's consistent success. This paraprofessionals-based program design keeps costs low and quality high while providing useful employment for village women who have obtained somewhat more education.
The education program has evolved over the years to reflect the changing needs of the rural poor. At first, the program lasted three years, usually between the ages of 8 and 10. This was a year or two later than students start public school; the reason for this, BRAC officials explain, is to identify students who would for some reason likely never start public school or would drop out almost immediately. The greatest emphasis is on literacy and numeracy, health and hygiene, basic science, and social studies. The program was designed in part to establish a foundation from which students could enter the fourth grade of the public school system. There is also a system of basic education for somewhat older children, aged 11 to 14. In 1998, the schools expanded to a four-year program covering the five-year primary curriculum in less time. This redesign was in response to the large number of BRAC graduates interested in continuing their education at the secondary level. BRAC says that today more than 90% of its graduates continue in the formal system. BRAC is also well known for its health care innovations and programs.
Here, too, BRAC used paraprofessionals from the villages in which it works- for example, in large-scale activities such as the directly observed treatment short course (DOTS) for TB and training for oral rehydration therapy (ORT). The DOTS program exemplifies the roles in BRAC of monitoring and evaluation, waiting until a program is working smoothly and shows clear evidence of positive impact before replicating it so as to reach a very wide population. BRAC then proceeds to relentlessly work to reach a very wide population, a process known as "bringing to scale." To bring needed services to the poor, BRAC has had to innovate. Many of BRAC's programs, including its "microcredit-plus," nonformal primary education, health, and legal education programs, have been emulated in other countries, though not yet on the same scale. BRAC continues to innovate with new ventures such as the Targeting the Ultrapoor program. Ian Smillie depicts BRAC as a "learning organization."
He quotes David Korten as saying that BRAC "comes as near to a pure example of a learning organization as one is likely to find." Smillie describes remarkable cases of BRAC's honesty to funders and others about the organization's failures rather than the usual defensiveness and exaggerations. Of course, being able to explain the causes of failure convincingly, made possible by careful investigation, and offering credible next steps that put into practice the lessons learned from failure were necessary conditions for getting further funding under such circumstances. Success stories can be helpful, but so can failure stories. Smillie describes several, such as the purchase of poorly designed motorcycles from China and ventures such as production of silk and tubewells and pumps. This honesty and behavior as a learning organization were both effective and of great appeal to donors, who provided critical resources to implement what had been learned. Smillie reports that some foundations, including smaller ones, provided funds for experiments, and larger funders helped bring successes to scale.
Though one can question how it is possible for BRAC to do so many things without losing its management discipline and poverty focus, BRAC can hardly be blamed for taking so seriously the insistence of donors that it become more self-sufficient. And rather than charge the poor for "full cost recovery" of basic medical and other services for the poor, as the development agencies advised in earlier years, BRAC views it as a better option to subsidize services for the desperately poor with profits from productive enterprises that themselves provide employment and guarantee inputs that poor farmers need and help find markets for the products of the poor. There are very strong penalties for unethical behavior, and BRAC is considered to hold to an unusually high standard of probity. However, it is difficult for an outsider to be sure where all the cross-subsidies are going under the current system of accounts. One of the most important factors in BRAC's success has been the high quality of BRAC management. Abed is one of the most impressive management talents in the country, and BRAC has been able to recruit many other highly competent managers from all sectors of Bangladesh. It seems that BRAC is so much better than management in the private sector that it has repeatedly been able to find untapped opportunities and to profit from them. (This is true not just of BRAC but of other leading NGOs such as Grameen.)
The most effective scope for a company depends not just on the type of activities it specializes in but on the management skills available in the rest of the country. If one organization's talent is high while that of its competitors is low, one company or NGO can participate in many activities that in another country would constitute an inefficient distraction away from its "core competencies." But one can find no hint of a negative attitude toward the private sector at BRAC; instead, BRAC is actively working to foster its growth. BRAC is working to improve the efficacy of government as well. For example, although the public schools are in some sense competitors of its education program, BRAC is working actively with interested government officials to infuse the public schools with some of the ingredients of its own success. Among its ventures, BRAC has established a university, a bank, and a program for assisting private small and medium-size enterprises. Finally, it has established international affiliates in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, southern Sudan, Tanzania, Pakistan, Siera Leone, and Liberia. Launched in June 2006, BRAC Uganda is already one of the largest NGOs in that country, working in microfinance, primary education, health, and agriculture.
Most staff are Ugandan nationals. The low costs of BRAC's activities in Africa is remarkable; for the case of Tanzania, Smillie describes how the organization saves money while maintaining quality. He notes that staff all are "experienced, top-notch professionals in their fields. BRAC's overheads are minuscule in comparison to other international NGOs because all of their staff lives together in shared accommodation, and they do not bring their families with them. [Staff] get sizable premiums for working abroad and home leave every six months," but "they are still paid on the basis of their Bangladeshi salaries, so BRAC's staff costs are tiny in comparison with other agencies." BRAC has demonstrated that it can thrive inside and outside Bangladesh; it remains to be seen how many other developing country-based NGOs can go national in scale, widen in scope, and even eventually go global. BRAC faces several challenges. As BRAC's first generation of founders retires, replacements must be found who have the same special combination of talents and commitment. As BRAC continues to grow and diversify, it will confront management problems that would prove challenging in any environment, but particularly for a poverty-focused organization operating in rural areas of low-income nations. But BRAC has consistently served as a pioneer, both in innovation of specific programs and in widening the vision of development practitioners around the world about the possible range and scope for the work of NGOs in developing countries.
Questions for Discussion
1. Why do you think so many developing countries were convinced of the necessity of development planning? Were the reasons strictly economic? Comment.
2. Explain and comment on some of the major arguments or rationales, both economic and noneconomic, for planning in developing economies.
3. Planning is said to be more than just the formulation of quantitative economic targets. It is often described as a process. What is meant by the planning process, and what are some of its basic characteristics?
4. Compare and contrast the three basic types of planning models: aggregate growth models, inputoutput analysis, and project appraisal. What do you think are some of the strengths and weaknesses of these models from the standpoint of planning in developing nations?
5. There is much talk today about the demise of development planning. Many observers assert that development planning has been a failure. List and explain some of the major reasons for plan failures. Which reasons do you think are the most important? Explain your thinking.
6. Distinguish between market failure and government failure. Does rent-seeking behavior occur only as a result of government failure? Explain your answer.
7. What are some of the difficulties associated with the establishment of market economies in developing countries? In what type of country is the market more likely to succeed? Why?
8. What do you think should be the role of the state in contemporary developing countries? Is the choice between markets and government an either-or choice? Explain your answer.
9. What features of the political process make effective development policymaking so difficult? 10. Why is development participation not used more often despite its potentially decisive role in ensuring the success of development policies?
10. Do you think that setting goals for development could in itself help a developing nation to achieve those goals? Why or why not?
11. Discuss the potential role of NGOs in relation to the government and private sectors.
12. Discuss the components of the original Washington Consensus. What do you think was most lacking from this framework? What important factors have achieved widespread acceptance in the evolution toward a new consensus?
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also Include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.