at unwomens linkedin Chris Macrae posted this
60 years of alumni of sdgsjapa
lennon -imagine | ...when i'm 64 |
over 50 years fazle abed helped billion asian poorest village mothers design village networking solutions so that next girls and boys born enjoyed a life of love and opportunity mapping brac is difficult becuuse it grew about 30% a year in village livelihood trainers ; it needed to do this to achieve nation building goals like raising bangladesh life expectancy from 25 below world average to average- in abeds 50 years villagers gained literally a generation brac was also selectively the most collaborative organisation so sustainability purposes of all its partners grew in ways beyond numbers what brac grew at more normal rates wete monetary accounts within its own organisation we have chosen to start by mapping the new partnering networks in abed blended through 3rd decade: 1992-2002 was the decade that bridged village solution without electricity grids or wired telephones to imagining how vilagers could choose optimal leapfrog parters now that solar and mobile phones could connect the world's most loving -brac newer webs 4.5 1.3 |
G3 Village Health Networks3.4 tb tuberculosis 3.5 partners affordable health -frugal , last mile– bottom of pyramid collabs 3.6 reunite epidemiologists + tropical disease + community health leaders- james grant school of public health 3.1 doordash non-prescription medicines 3.2 maternal skill oral rehydration 3.3 continent-scale vaccination village food production 2.4 brac poultry -first of 14 nation leading enterprises 2.5 brac dairy second of 14 nation lead enterprises> 2.1 village rice production 2.2 village veggie production 2.3 village crafts and rural to earn income from city ... | 4.4 brac university 4.6 james grant school of public health 4.1 adult livelihood education 4.2 primary education 4.3 secondarry girls clubs libraries... | 5 PLATFORMS FOR ENTRORENEURIAL CONCEPTS and PARTNERING 5.3 bracnet 5.1 100000 person metavillage 5.2 billion women collab... 1 finance to end poverty 1.1 transformation aid model- microfranchiing plus best ever grants solutions 1.2 brac microfinance plus |
Thank you, Abed bhai | | lennon -imagine | ...when i'm 64 |
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed |
When I began working with farmers struggling with poverty in 1972, I was a young accountant, fresh from a job in the finance department of Shell Oil. I had lofty ideas of how I could help transform our new nation, Bangladesh, which was then one of the poorest countries on earth. I thought that if we could empower the poor by providing services like livelihood training, literacy classes and health and family planning, they would be able to vanquish the extreme poverty and hunger they had endured for far too long.
The world was quite a different place then. Bangladesh had gone through a bloody war for independence, and the world’s great powers were locked in a struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. The Green Revolution was still in its infancy, but we knew the vast promise it held for it had already delivered spectacular increases in cereal crop yields in India, West Pakistan and the Philippines; for this, Norman Borlaug had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
We were therefore optimistic—sometimes overly so. I told our first donor, Oxfam, that we would eradicate illiteracy in our intervention area within three years, which proved to be an unrealistic goal. Just gaining people’s trust was a huge task. Many of the lessons I had learned about top-down management in the private sector did not apply in rural development, which relied for its success on participatory decision-making.
I called this organisation BRAC, for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. We set up demonstration farms, completely staffed by BRAC personnel, to show people how to grow new crops, including vegetables some of them had never seen before. The sight of young university graduates planting and ploughing the fields brought sniggers of amusement from the villagers, who seemed to think we were dirtying our hands just for the fun of it. It was only after they saw the yields at our demonstration farms that they began to listen to us.
Even then, progress was slow. Irrigation was not the norm in Bangladesh at the time, and bringing tube-well irrigation to rain-fed fields would prove to be a tremendous hurdle in the coming decades. The deeply ingrained habits of farmers would also not change overnight.
A glance at the numbers shows how far we have come since then. In 1973, Bangladesh produced just ten million tonnes of rice from nine million hectares of cultivated land—a paltry yield that was not nearly enough to feed our people. Today, the amount of cultivated land has shrunk by some measures, due to the crowding of homes, roads and industrial infrastructure, yet we managed to produce 35.5 million tonnes of rice in the market year 2016-2017.
What has changed? To start with, nearly 100 percent of rural farmers now go to school and therefore have at least some ability to read and write, which means they are more receptive to new ideas and technologies, including high-yielding seeds, fertilizers and pest-management systems. We have built dramatically more effective delivery mechanisms for seeds. In 1998, BRAC began importing hybrid rice seeds from China and field-testing them for viability in different ecological zones. We now market 12 varieties of hybrid rice in Bangladesh, including four developed at our own research center. This seed enterprise generates a surplus of around $2 million annually, about half of which we reinvest in the enterprise itself; the remainder helps fund our other, non-profit-making development efforts, such as schools and healthcare.
The Green Revolution did happen eventually, but it is not yet finished. We continue to bring better systems and technologies to the poor in Bangladesh and other regions of the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, recent randomized controlled trials have shown the effectiveness of pro-poor agriculture service delivery, in which seeds and other valuable inputs are distributed through self-employed, trained “community agriculture promoters” who generate extra income for themselves by charging a small margin on the goods they sell to their neighbours.
These are but a few examples of how the effective delivery of technology and empowerment can end patterns of suffering that have prevailed for centuries. We humans have called into question the fatalistic belief, prevalent throughout our history, that widespread misery is inevitable. No longer do people assume that hunger, poverty, seasonal famine, the oppression of women and the marginalization of great portions of society are simply aspects of the human experience, perhaps even ordained by some higher power. The Green Revolution gives people the power to disrupt these systems of suffering, forever.
footnote from chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk washington dc region and glsasgow
My father norman macrae who was privileged to publish this asian sustainability economic models had two other peculiar experiences in the 1950s - being at the bitrth of the european union - initially a wonderful conceot but which by 1963 was set to copy any political nightmares usa policy led. And interviewing von neumann whose biography he later wrote, the big news from von neumann was 100 times more tech would arrive every decade to probably 2020s when machines would be able to do some real time governance analyses that humans could not. In modern jargon industrial revolution 4 is here- and a aerificial intel designed to beat covid would have been much simpler than autonomous cars if only someone like google had priritised the goals of google.orgs first ceo larry brilliant.
Each of abed's 5 decades supporting billion poorest village women end poverty is extraordinary but decade 4 2002-2012 is super-extraordinary.
what had 65 year-old abed learnt? and what risk-of-extinction challenges were billion poorest women and all 7.5 billion people facing as the most critical quarter of century of von neumann tech reached every gps-coded device?
40 years earlier: abed had learnt from his days as a shell ceo that only a good business model can change the world;
ABED RULE OF THUMB 1
you need positive cashflow to scale, and to prevent uniquely sustainable purpose (evidence from 20th century on this is at economist intel book brand chartering by chris and norman macrae, 1996) being taken over either by an image-led corporation directly or business lobby politicians;
abed wanted a different global model from dominating the world, the way now sun by about 70 of the biggest hundred economies in the world are now corporate
he had always seen sustainability as about integrating every village/community into the way nature evolves the world
digital leaps from 2002 : through his bracnet partnerships now about 6 years experience of seeing how tech partners might bring mobile and solar connectivity to village mothers who had never before been connected by electricity or telephones let alone smart devices and he was one year into birthing what could 4.4 university do as partnership platform to sdg1 to 17 -
as an engineer abed also possessed treasure maps- deep data village architecture of every market brac and a billion women had composed round human developments most urgent challenges to the very poorest
additionally, he was being challenged from silicon valley millennial goals influencers eg the likes or mrs steve jobs to take brac international (not to reserve the magic of brac to women nation builders of bangladesh - her demand was reaching other west coast influencers like bill gates foundation and george soros east coast networks which had initially funded grameens internet girls. tick tock )
so he worked on 2 ideas at same time
what nation leading enterprises did brac need to secure value chains so that village mothers and urbanising daughters could be free to market womens most urgent needs as the nation accelerated its changed from 90% to 70% rural
see bracs 14 enterprises 2.6 and additions to sdg-compass 1, namely: 1.3 ultra poverty graduation 1.4 brac sme city bank 1.5 bkash cashless banking which came about when the technologists that had given dr yunus village phones decided they wanted a more sustainable type of partnership network than yunus as the worlds greatest storyteller
abed was deeply concerned not just with which solutions of brac's partners' first three decades matched other countries most urgent needs but could he find an international funding institution that wanted to co-brand that national change for as long and it took to empower national culture- abed knew his limitations at 65 he iud not want to spread his learning too thin; and his interpretation of paulo freire culture was it checked out which faiths grounded servant leadership in every community - he rated himself very lucky that health markets needed by confucian and muslim ladies had so far found fransiscan values a moral and conscious translation- as indeed had the silk road marketers across eurasia 800 years earlier
regarding brac's journey from regional to global identity since a bangladesh registered ngo cannot fundraise for international projects :abed asked himself where should brac establish its international hq -coming from royal dutch shell abed gave the netherlands first opportunity to value this which thankfully the royal family welcomed...
4th industrial revolution makes human and artificial intel inseparable flows therefore, as robots dont get in debt
world desperately seeks type 2 universities whose sustainabulity model involves zero hard-working student tuition debt
please note in a way this is an odd mapping question because if it was both politically and economically and sustainably correct for any university to share a mooc on how a billion asian women united round solving developments most extreme challenges then the end of masters of silo monopolies would make every under30s search for sustainability skills friendship so much more transparent and emotionally rewarding; if no superstar had mental health problems star would mean many lived up ro supporting their generation lives matter in practical action-learnable ways not vacuous tv ads or endless paper spread strategic policies
the japan embassy hosted 2 dinner rountables - 6 hours of discussion connected to this map in 2012 - i am not uptodate- eg ask sir fazle's son shameran abed head of brac international and all sdg1 collab networks
fazle abed's criteria - solutions must impact 50 million people's sustainability
at least quarter outside nation of residence through partnerships if thats simplest to blur if a sustainability university needs a nationality
abed believed every university in singapore was a sustainability collab university- lets say 5 -rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk if there are more
abed believed south korea could match singapore in wanting graduates to celebrate 3 in one development - end poverty, grow middle clsass, go green- also unlike singapore that is constrained by geography to be a superport for maximum 8 milion livelihoods - koreas supercity can be any size and korea has land for many green revolutions a city state cant do on home ground
i think abed thought japan could start with 2 universities- in fact the country could support 10+ one day but asian sustainabiltiy needs 100% asian consciousness and until japan feels free of usa endebtedness its hard to see eg japan launching the digital ASIO needed to combat the rich mens dollar and euro; i am happy to be tod i am completely wrong about japan; it is where asia rising started in late 1950s but while north korea is a trillion dollars under-invested in , japan needs to be the regions deepest diplomat
i love hong kong- i dot know anywhere whos people have created more; but i am not sure hong kong needs universities as much as it needs digital hubs led by engineers; this is perhaps whaT the core of many new universities will be but lets say zero hong kong from now
taiwan can easily celebrate 2 universities- many more one day
abed expected china to go from 2 to 30 universities but his crieria of freedom of women empowerment waas one he was one that i dont think his cancer let him fully discuss
every nation in asia that values youth as connecting the sdg generation needs one university provided it can find a culture that values sustainability more than international politics; perhaps universities could twin population are border cities investing in connecting both culture, nature and infrastructure
(back in 2000s brazil's lula proposed 3 countries who share the largest freshwater repository could design an united university around bon aqua and help marry world social and economic forums- it never happened but the idea of trasnational studies at natures greatest transnational resources - eg the arctic circle ni - is compelling
or where other work is so demonstrably needed that a particular skill eg vaccinating - must be a politics free zone- most of the emirates seem to have been doing very well with new universities qatar seems happier if one campus inviting worldwide partners while i believe dubai-abu dhabi are planting 5
there are associations i know trying to plant new universities in asia's toughest places ,like palestine- yes these places must be included but are they wheret he first 30 of the 100 will be in time for 2020s students last chance decade