Transcriber: Faizah Aziz Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good afternoon.
It's a pleasure to be presenting here, especially at Columbia.
I wanted to share a bit of my story with you.
I was born and raised in Bangladesh.
I was fortunate enough to be born in a family
that could afford me a great education
and all the opportunities I could dream of.
But I was also growing up in a country that had a lot of poverty.
Growing up, what I hadn't realized was the bubble I had created around me
as if poverty was something distant, something I had nothing to do with.
I hadn't realized this
until I left for Canada for my undergraduate education.
That's the first time I was away from Bangladesh for a long period.
In Canada, you don't see the extreme face of poverty that you do in Bangladesh.
So when I went back home during my break, the contrast really hit me.
That's when I had this horrific realization
of the poverty and the discrimination that existed in my country.
I wanted to do something about it.
I wanted to help those in need, to the extent possible.
So once I graduated, I thought I'll work for a non-profit here,
do the good that I wanted to do while living in the first world,
because, frankly speaking, I enjoyed living here.
I enjoyed the liberty I had as a woman, and being able to do simple things,
like going for a movie or trying out exotic cuisine.
But when I started actually working, I realized how wrong I was.
I realized how much it mattered to me
to be at the grassroots, to be able to see and feel the impact.
So after a lot of thinking and many objections,
I decided to move back home.
Fortunately enough, when I moved to Bangladesh,
I was recruited by one of the most amazing non-profits, called BRAC.
BRAC is, to many,
the largest non-profit in the world,
in terms of its outreach.
Living in Bangladesh, I had heard of BRAC,
but I hadn't realized quite how big it was.
It's massive.
It reaches out to over a 138 million across the world.
It has 100,000 full-time and part-time staff.
It has a yearly expenditure of over 500 million dollars,
and it is 70% self-financed.
So it's pretty big, and it's all exciting,
but frankly speaking, I was quite afraid.
I was afraid of being lost,
because big meant bureaucracy, less innovation, and therefore, less impact.
I was afraid that I would be lost
and my purpose of moving back would be defeated.
But guess what?
I actually saw the elephant dance.
Despite its size and its outreach, BRAC has been able to remain
truly innovative, and effective, and changing lives of millions of people.
I learned how the organization managed to do so
by working with the organization for five years.
I wanted to share some of those key lessons with you today.
The first one is "Pilot."
Piloting an idea, testing an idea is the mantra in BRAC.
When BRAC sees a problem
and identifies a solution it thinks it might work,
it immediately starts working on it.
That's at the core of the success of all our major programs
including health,microfinance, human rights and legal services,
education, name it.
I got to experience it first hand when I joined BRAC.
BRAC had an idea that it wanted me to test
around socially and financially empowering adolescent girls.
Adolescents are basically the population between the age group of 10 and 19.
BRAC wanted to help this population by providing them a safe space,
where these girls could come and meet other girls,
read some books, play some games, and just be girls.
But that's a rare space to find in Bangladesh.
Being a teenage girl in Bangladesh is not fun.
At that age, your mobility becomes restricted,
you are confined within your household.
Even today, 1 in 2 girls gets married by the age of 16,
and the majority of them are mothers by the age of 18.
BRAC wanted to change this somehow.
Once I was recruited, I was immediately given a team,
an area where I could start testing the idea.
I decided to go out there, to meet some of these girls,
to understand what we could possibly do for them.
Frankly speaking,
when I first met the girls I was quite skeptical.
They were so shy.
They couldn't look me in the eye when they were speaking to me,
they lacked confidence,
and I really wondered how much of a difference
providing them with the space could possibly do.
Anyways, we decided to go ahead with the program,
we implemented it.
I decided to go back to the same place
to meet those girls after a couple of months.
When I went there, I was blown away.
I met a changed group of girls.
This is what I found: a smiling, excited, confident group of girls
who could not only look me in the eye, but question me, engage with me.
Confidence is a key step towards self-empowerment.
We were onto something. I was happy just doing this.
I was happy just doing a bit more of this,
getting this program to a few more girls.
But BRAC made me think otherwise.
BRAC taught me how to think big.
When BRAC saw this working, it didn't wait.
It decided to move quickly and expand not just in Bangladesh,
but in some of the other countries we were working in,
in Uganda, Tanzania, Southern Sudan, Afghanistan,
because in all these places,
girls are being discriminated,
constantly being abused in different ways,
there was a major lack of empowerment.
So we needed to do something about it.
But while moving quickly,
what BRAC also did was ensure flexibility in the program,
so that we can continue developing the model
and make it as effective as possible.
So that's the second lesson:
moving quickly while being flexible at the same time.
We started off with the safe space,
but we quickly realized
that in order to socially and financially empower girls,
we needed a holistic approach.
So we decided to introduce life skills education, financial literacy,
livelihood training, access to savings and credit facilities, community awareness
around the issues of girls.
But what was interesting was how each country adopted the model
to suit to the needs of the girls of that country.
For example, for financial literacy,
what we were teaching girls in Bangladesh
was the thought process behind financial empowerment.
Because at that age, they don't really manage money in Bangladesh.
But in Uganda for example, girls were already involved in businesses,
so we were teaching them business management skills.
Today, this program is actually reaching out
to 300,000 girls across the world, and we hope to expand it further.
But what's the point of all these experimentation
if they are not effective?
And that's the third lesson: constant evaluation.
You need to constantly evaluate,
to know whether you are reaching your goal.
BRAC has monitoring and evaluation built into every one of its programs.
We have research and evaluation department,
we have monitoring department.
These units are constantly providing managers like me with feedback;
whether we are being effective or not.
We are asked to set indicators against which we measure performance.
So for example, in Bangladesh,
when we conducted this study on whether the program was being effective,
we found that there was actually a positive impact
on school involvement, on increasing financial literacy,
as well as earnings of girls.
In Uganda, for example, we found that there was a positive impact
on lowering pregnancy, usage of condoms, and increased savings among girls.
So it's essential that we're constantly evaluated,
to know whether we are reaching the goal
that we want to achieve.
These three lessons are essentially
what you would find across the history of BRAC
and what has made this organization
truly successful and remaining effective and innovative despite its size.
At the end of the day, all these effort is worthwhile,
when we see smiles on the faces of those we work for.
Thank you so much for listening.
(Applause)