2,1 2,2 3.3 step 1 billion women led green revolution and last mile vaccination revolution 1972-1984

by 1962 the economist -see free archives normanmacrae.net - was reporting north east asia - specifically japan, korea south, taiwan- had used 17 years of america's restoration of peace to innovate 2 transformations in economic modeling needed to end poverty traps that were endemic across Asia .

As recently as 1960, most Asians had little access to machines which had started in scotland 1760 -this lack of geographical inclusion had compounded through 2 centuries mainly because of the operating systems of british and dutch colonial histories albeit pressured by french and other europeans. The scale of this problem spanned across Asia's 60% of the worlds population

at unwomens linkedin Chris Macrae posted this

60 years of alumni of sdgsjapa

these models were approved by jf kennedy but then along with black lawyer medgars evers he was assassinated in 1963 and there is no real evidence that american academia/legislature ever bothered to study potentially exciting compound consequences around the world -certainly american economic schools remained wholly blind to these diversity-deep advances on knowhow networking which it must be said empowered -let alone financed- small medium entrepreneurial revolution (macrae 1976) not big corporate dominance;

 the wonderful value of knowhow networking (which can make industrial revolution 3 a whole new ball game)  is it multiplies value in application unlike consuming up things. to see what happens when even one person spends 50 years on mapping knowhow networking collaboratively because a billion poorest women needed to know and apply please these flow- go to abedmooc.com

 also villages were free of dismal television advertising so communications between a trillion asian women were morally smart in adam smiths 1758 common sense terminology; just as the power of machnes ie industrial revolution 1 can be abused if white empires representing 15% of humans largely colonise/exclude everyone else's access to the power of energy; industrial rev 2 machine telecommunications can be abused if hate or vested interest messages drown out lives matter communications, or even political electioneering

ironically how rural keynesianism freed a billion asians from starvation revolves round connecting to alumni of american borlaug though his main reaearch lab was in mexico- this made things quite complicated- under kennedy's successor johnson for example there was a huge row- india wanted the borlaug cultivated seeds to end starvation ; mexico farmers owned them; american foreign assistance didnt like the collaboration india most needed - this should remind us that politics on any staple crop can quickly multiply badwill across nations

Fortunately for most highly populated asian countries west of india, rice was the main crop and as reported in the economist the main rice labs were already in ne asia by 1960 - and from then on being open sourced to any asians who wanted to end death by famine 2.1

3.3  the idea that illiterate village mothers could move a nation or half a continent to get vaccinated is something that required a triad of connections

unicef james grant

the village women of bangladesh

the village women of tropical china who had pioneered celebration of barefoot community doctors but needed the positive encouragement of unicef and abeds demonstration that bangladesh women can vaccinate a rural nation before vaccination mid 1980s china became a reality too

it should be evident from the wikipedia geo-summary shown below - that if the half of youth living in the tropics in quarter 2 of 21st c are not linkedin to sustainability solutions, then our species is a goner- the tropics is too pivotal to mother nature's globe and the population is too big 

ever since trust was won by rural mothers to 3.3 vaccinate on a continental scale chinese and bangladesh villagers have shared health and village crop solutions but not financial-ownership ones since there are very different ways that women "lift up half the sky" earned credit in bangladesh and china- how china financed this was announced as one of the economic miracles in the economist 1977

what's important to value is how urgently from 1971 both nations were on a journey of raising village women productivity from near zero to the majority of work needed to communally end village poverty

studying rhese green and last mile health revolutions - across grassroots village networks is we suggest the most massively valuable human development story before millennials faced compound consequences of blending artificial intel and human intel; lets hope the blending of intels in 2020s goes as deep/diverse as that asian village women have advanced since through the last quarter of 20th c onwards 

DETERMINED TO LEAPFROG FORWARD NOT FALL INTO A DIGITAL DIVIDE

at a millennium goals party mrs steve jobs asked fazle abed why a billion girls knowhow in solving sustainability's most life critical challenges had not been shared globally- would brac please go international; abed something which even the beatles appeared not to have imagined humanly possible- when i'm 64 i will devote as much of my time responding to end poverty solution all over the world as  the villages where a billion women have worked so hard-

BRAC - Thank you, Abed bhai - YouTube 5:31 Thank you, Abed bhai |

lennon -imagine

...when i'm 64

 of abed's 5 decades relentlessly empowering a billion poorest women,  the fourth and the 5th also embarked on meeting mrs steve jobs partnership challenge; abed turned brac into civic society's largest collaboration partnership and joyful worldwide sdgs maps; he asked for help with one legacy wish- connecting the world's number 1 partnership of new universities wanting the younger half of the world to be the first sustainability generation which we discuss here

rather belatedly the borlaug networking knowledge that abed had helped scale a billion times awarded him the worlds number 1 food for humanity prize- this is the speech he made to celbrate thos wonderful occasion- this indicates the collab compass universities will unite around for sdg 2; sir fazle's son shameran is the centre of gravity for educators linking in sdg1; health as we seen with covid will need totally new university collaborations; we look at the work universities will need to do to unite all sustainability education systems here 

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Technology and Empowerment: Fulfilling the Green Revolution’s promise to disrupt systems of suffering.

 My George Washington Carver Internship Experience | Main Page | My Passion: The World Food Prize 

 

By Sir Fazle Hasan Abed
2015 World Food Prize Laureate

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.