BRAC is an international development Organisation based in Bangladesh. In order to receive foreign donations, BRAC was subsequently registered under the NGO Affairs Bureau of the Government of Bangladesh. BRAC is the largest non-governmental development Organisation in the world, in terms of number of employees as of September 2016. Established by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 1972 after the independence of Bangladesh, BRAC is present in all 64 districts of Bangladesh as well as 16 other countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
BRAC states that it employs over 90,000 people, roughly 70 percent of whom are women, and that it reaches more than 126 million people with its services. The organization is partly self-funded through a number of social enterprises that include a dairy and food project, a chain of retail handicraft stores called Aarong, seed and Agro, and chicken. BRAC has operations in 12 countries of the world.
History
Known formerly as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, then as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and later as Building Resources Across Communities, BRAC was initiated in 1972 by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed at Shallah Upazillah in the district of Sunamganj as ll-scale relief and rehabilitation project to help returning war refugees after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. 14 thousand homes had to be rebuilt as part of the relief effort, as well as several hundred fishing boats; BRAC claims to have done this within nine months, as well as opening medical centres and providing other essential services.
Until the mid-1970s, BRAC concentrated on community development through village development programmes that included agriculture, fisheries, cooperatives, rural crafts, adult literacy, health and family planning, vocational training for women and construction of community centres. A Research and Evaluation Division (RED) was set up to evaluate its activities and decide direction, and in 1977, BRAC began taking a more targeted approach by creating Village Organisations (VO) to assist the landless, small farmers, artisans, and vulnerable women. That same year BRAC set up a commercial printing press to help finance its activities. The handicraft retail chain called Aarong was established the following year.
In the late 1970s, diarrhoea was a leading cause of child mortality in Bangladesh. In February 1979, BRAC began a field trial, in two villages of what was then Sulla thana, of a campaign to combat diarrhoea. The following year they scaled up the operation and named it the Oral Therapy Extension Programme (OTEP). It taught rural mothers in their homes how to prepare an oral rehydration solution (ORS) from readily available ingredients and how to use it to treat diarrhoea. The training was reinforced with posters and radio and TV spots.
The ten-year programme taught 12 million households spread over 75,000 villages in every part of Bangladesh except the Chittagong Hill Tracts (which were unsafe to work in because of civil unrest). Fifteen years after they were taught, the vast majority of mothers could still prepare a safe and effective ORS. The treatment was little known in Bangladesh when OTEP began, but 15 years later it was used in rural households for severe diarrhoea more than 80% of the time, one of the highest rates in the world.
Non Formal Primary Education was started by BRAC in 1985.
In 1979, BRAC started a Rural Development Programme (RDP). This was intended to give members access to credit and to savings facilities. The programme involved considerable growth in the number of people who were members of BRAC: in 1989, three years after the start of the Rural Development Programme, there were 350,000 members, and by 1995 there were 1.2 to 1.5 million members. An evaluation by the United Kingdom Department for International Development in 1998 found that the programme had been successful, though not all the aims were achieved. BRAC's own evaluation in 1996 found "gradual improvements in the indicators such as wealth, revenue earning assets, value of house structure, the level of cash earned, per capita expenditure on food, total household expenditure", but hoped-for improvements in village self-management had not taken place, and the drop-out rate of members was high.
In 1991, the Women's Health Development programme commenced. The following year BRAC established a Centre for Development Management (CDM) in Rajendrapur.
BRAC opened an Information Technology Institute in 1999.
In 2001, BRAC established a university called BRAC University.