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Thinking Big, Going Global: A Southern NGO Takes on the World
25 February 2010 - Naomi Hossain
From relative obscurity as a Bangladeshi NGO, BRAC's international profile has soared recently. IDS' Naomi Hossain reflects on BRACs global expansion and asks what it means for the role of NGOs in development.
Going global
‘Small may be beautiful', goes BRAC's unofficial motto, ‘but big is necessary'. A keen sense of the need for scale drives its breathtaking expansion, since the 2000s to Afghanistan, Liberia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, with replication programmes in Haiti, India and elsewhere, and offices in the UK and the US. It is reportedly the biggest NGO in Afghanistan; elsewhere it is fast gaining ground.
BRAC's international profile has soared of late. F. H. Abed, BRAC's founder, was knighted last week for services to poverty. The Economist ran a glowing piece on 18 February, feting the BRAC strategy of ‘running an NGO as a business and taking seriously the social context of poverty'. BRAC's work in Haiti came to light after the January earthquake, when its UK office channeled donations to its partner Fonkoze. A book-length history was published last year. BRAC is suddenly everywhere.
The first Southern origin International NGO
It is rare for a southern country organisation to go global in this way, even though others, including the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank (also from Bangladesh), have exported their ideas. To date, international NGOs have exclusively originated in the rich north. When the international media talks of ‘aid workers' it is typically the white employees of Medecins Sans Frontiere or Oxfam (etc) to whom they refer. BRAC is a different kind of development animal; its appearance in the aid jungle is unexpected partly because its jars with the familiar notion that aid (ideas, finance, projects) flows from north to south.
The new face of aid?
F. H. Abed has a telling story: at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting a former Prime Minister of Canada asked ‘Why is Abed going to Africa? Has he finished all the work in Bangladesh?' A former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka swiftly retorted ‘Is it only Northern NGOs that can go everywhere?' Perhaps BRAC's global expansion raises the possibility of new kinds of aid relationships. Can we expect more equitable power relations between NGOs and beneficiaries if both are southern? Does solidarity flow more easily than charity and patronage under such conditions? What difference will BRAC's Bangladeshi origins make in other poor countries?
The challenges of scaling up
While researchers and journalists occupy themselves with such questions, BRAC focuses on the challenges of building development institutions for the long-term. Current problems - of securing finance, retaining staff, negotiating regulations on banking and credit - are teething problems to be tackled head-on. No BRAC senior manager will tell you they depend on south-south solidarity to ease the hard job of doing development on the ground. Nor will they tell you it is all going smoothly. BRAC's greatest strength has always been its ‘soft' skills - ability to admit error, learn, adapt, and innovate. There are risks in finding out what works on this unfamiliar ground, new mistakes to be made, and lessons to be learned. It should be well worth watching what happens to this new tiger in the aid jungle.
Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team, and was previously a member of BRAC's Research and Evaluation Division (1994-5 and 2004-8). Her Working Paper on BRAC's global expansion (with Anasuya Sengupta) was published at the end of 2009.
Photo: Jake Lyell/BRAC.
Related Publications
- Hossain, N. and Sengupta, A. (2010) 'Thinking Big, Going Global: The Challenge of BRAC’s Global Expansion', IDS Working Paper 339, Brighton: IDS
- Hossain, N. and Sengupta, A. (2009) 'Thinking Big, Going Global: the challenge of BRAC’s Global Expansion (Research Summary)', IDS Research Summary of IDS Working Paper 339, Brighton: IDS