Archive for 2 June 2009
BRAC – like Risk, but without the risk
The concept of risk has been discussed by many, and often, over the past year, as citizens around the world voice their concerns about the global recession. Mortgage risk, loan risk, credit risk, bailout risk, risk assessment, risk of spending too much, risk of spending too little, and on and on. A lot of risky business (and not the underwear dance kind) has been going on and we are paying for it now in all too literal a way.
There is another kind of risk though; one that I think some of you may be familiar with. That’s right, it’s Risk, as in epic board game, world domination style Risk.
I have been thinking about this particular kind of Risk lately due to the fact that while working with the Kiva field partner BRAC, I cannot escape how much the organization makes me think of the game, with its trademark little army men taking control of continents and sweeping across the globe in the attempt to gain complete domination of the two dimensional board game-world.
Only in BRAC’s case, the army is not little plastic figures, but a human, benevolent BRAC army of Bangladeshis, Afghanis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Southern Sudanese, Ugandans, and Tanzanians. And this is just the beginning – the army is growing, sweeping the globe, out to conquer the poverty of the world, one country at a time.
The figures in green represent BRAC, those in red...poverty.
Okay, my analogy may be getting out of hand at this point. “Out to conquer the poverty of the world” is definitely too melodramatic, but the quantity and quality of BRAC’s global work to improve the lives of those living in poverty is undeniably striking.
Created in 1972 as a small-scale relief and rehabilitation project that was designed as a response to the consequences of the liberation war in Bangladesh, BRAC has since evolved into the largest southern NGO in the world.
With its programs in Asia and Africa, BRAC provides services to more than 110 million people. These services include: microfinance, health, water and sanitation, education, adolescent education and life skills, agriculture, livestock, and other social development programs.
Poverty is a simple word for a complex beast – BRAC works to improve the quality of people’s lives using a holistic approach, with strategically linked programs that address the causes of poverty from multiple angles. This might mean that within a microfinance group, there will be a health worker providing medical supplies for her group members or that down the street from a microfinance meeting a client’s daughter will be learning about gender issues at an adolescent club.
