Fifty years at the top is an achievement for any organization and BRAC has done that. Abed bhai came from a history that suited the first fifty years. But that history is rapidly ending and the challenge for the current BRAC leadership is to do a new “Abed”.  As it celebrates the past, the future kicks at the door. The old BRAC is over with its “noblesse oblige” values to do good for others less advantageous.

In the post 1971 turmoil and turnover, NGOs were the last resort of the well-meaning and dependent middle class who got left out in the post-Independence class-power distribution. But NGOs are coming to an end. If BRAC is to survive, it needs to look at a future without borrowed wisdom from the West and explore and use the lesson from why despite so much denial, the rural poor have done so well.

Also read: UNDP to work with BRAC for accelerating pace of poverty reduction

Intermediaries in decline

BRAC is like all development organizations - an intermediary outfit. It carried resources of the better off world, mostly external to the rural poverty zones. It sustained the poor and as food related distress declined,  graduation from ultra-poverty increased and general health and social conditions got better overall.  But they were old battles and the BRAC after 50 faces a world in which people on their own tackled Covid even as the West predicted disaster while withholding vaccines for the rest of the world.

The “rights-based” idea spaces dominated by the NGO is largely replaced by the economic , more natural than elite constructed. Increasing strength of the BRAC client population means old services are not as required as before.

Micro-credit as an internal co-funder of its operations, is very important but the donor world is battered beyond belief. In the last 2 years, our most shocking discussion was with a donor who said, “GOB doesn’t listen to us anymore as it has so much more money.”  The mental shift has to be from “Bangladesh as poor” to “Bangladesh as potentially well off” . It’s the Liberal-Left that stigmatizes wealth making, those who are not in poverty themselves. This colonial hangover must go and as China has shown wealth making of the majority is a social change tool.

Also read: BRAC continues emergency services for Rohingyas, locals amid Covid-19 pandemic: BRAC Global ED

Into the future with dirty hands and all

BRAC didn’t want to enter the migration sector as a player because Abed bhai didn’t want people crowding the office and parades of unhappy clients. He didn’t then but when he did try it didn’t work. That was a lost opportunity in 2005. It’s the migration money that has become the most powerful agents of change in the rural areas. Rural intermediation has also grown but it is located in economics and exclusive to them as experiences of the Ultra-poverty alleviation shows.  

Banking is weak because most loans go through connections in the formal sector. He thought that Bkash would make banking easier and it has.  The rise of digital money also shows that. Clearly, he was thinking on the edge of the last historical phase but the focus on economics was imagined as support of the poor and micro entrepreneurs. That has changed as SME enterprise and rural bonds and savings markets are bigger than ever. Agriculture and Aarong  are small time sectors. Its economic enhancement projects need to go to scale. BRAC needs to reimagine the future as Abed bhai did 50 years back.    

Increasingly, the people show they are able to organize their life better than the GOB does and as donors prescribe. Hanging on to SDGs should not be BRAC’s priority but high intensity economic expansion of people should be.  A much strengthened rural population doesn't need NGOs as much as they did till the 2000s.  BRAC needs to get a makeover.

Hopefully, it's goodbye to the old BRAC and welcome to the new BRAC. Congrats.