j.2040-0209.2009.00339 2.x

IDS WORKING PAPER 339
Thinking Big, Going Global:

The Challenge of BRAC’s
Global Expansion
Naomi Hossain and Anasuya Sengupta
December 2009
Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9RE UK
01
Thinking Big, Going Global: The Challenge of BRAC’s Global Expansion

IDS Working Paper 339
First published by the Institute of Development Studies in December 2009
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02
Thinking Big, Going Global: The Challenge of BRAC’s

Global Expansion
Summary
Since 2002, BRAC, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) of Bangladeshi
origin, has gone global. It has expanded its programme of ‘microfinance plus’
(education, health, enterprise support, etc) to Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone,
Southern Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Pakistan. It has established
organisations in the UK and the USA to raise funds and its international profile. It
is believed to be the largest NGO in Afghanistan, is growing fast elsewhere, and
has long been the largest non-governmental entity in Bangladesh. BRAC’s global
expansion appears to be part of a trend of the ‘South in the South’, marked by the
expansion of Chinese business in Africa, but also, it seems, by new forms of
Southern non-governmental organisation transplanted across Southern contexts.
This paper explores two challenges of BRAC’s global expansion. The first is the
challenges BRAC faces as it seeks to break new ground as the first International
NGO of Southern origin to take its programme and managerial expertise to other
countries. It is an ambitious agenda. A critical challenge is the need to attract
financing and carve out regulatory room for service delivery programmes within
new political spaces that are sometimes unfamiliar with and unwelcoming of
NGOs on the BRAC scale. The second challenge of the title is the challenge to
thinking about NGOs in development: discussions about NGOs in development
currently emphasise disappointment with their performance, and a withdrawal,
including among aid donors and discourses, from their ‘magic bullet’ heyday of the
late 1990s. While BRAC’s global expansion is facing challenges, its ambitious
expansionary programme counters disappointment around NGOs, raising new
questions about the roles of NGOs in development.
Keywords: NGOs; international NGOs; Microfinance; Bangladesh; relationships

for aid.
03
Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social

Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies. She is a political
sociologist, with 12 years of research experience in South Asia. Naomi previously
worked for the Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC, in Bangladesh, where
she established a programme of research on governance. Her main areas of
research interest are the politics of poverty and service delivery, gender and
governance.
Anasuya Sengupta is currently a Research Assistant at the Institute of

Development Studies, where she completed her Masters in Poverty and
Development in 2008. Her research interests and professional experience include
urban child poverty and violence in India. In 2008, she was an intern at BRAC in
Dhaka, where she conducted field research on urban children and violence.
04
Contents
Summary, keywords 3
Author notes 4
Acknowledgements 6
Acronyms 6
1 Introduction 9
1.1 Background: the new face of aid? 9
1.2 Approach, positionality and limitations 10
2 Going global: the birth of an international organisation 12
2.1 BRAC in growth mode: motives and critics 13
2.2 ‘Southern’ international NGOs: a growing trend? 19
2.3 How BRAC differs from other international NGOs 21
2.4 How BRAC scaled up: the Bangladesh story 23
3 The challenges of going global 32
3.1 Adapting to new contexts: how important is ‘Southern-ness’? 32
3.2 The end of alternatives? New ideologies of action 34
3.3 The aid regime 35
4 Conclusions: graduation or metamorphosis: from NGO to
social enterprise 37
References 39
Figures
Figure 2.1 BRAC budget and share of donor contribution, 1980–2008 28
Tables
Table 2.1 A chronology of BRAC’s global expansion 15
Table 2.2 A rough typology of ‘Southern’ international NGOs 20
Table 2.3 A chronology of BRAC in Bangladesh 25
05
Acknowledgements
Preparation of this paper was made possible through support from the SIDA and
SDC-funded Participation and Development Relations (PDR) programme at the
Participation, Power and Social Change Team, for which the authors are
extremely grateful. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the generous time
and inputs provided by Fazle Hasan Abed, Susan Davis, Sandra Kabir, Martin
Greeley, David Lewis and Rabeya Yasmin, including lengthy interviews and
follow-up questions and discussions. Particular thanks are due to Imran Matin,
who has discussed these issues with the authors over a number of years and
encouraged research on the topic, as well as to Martin Greeley, David Lewis and
Penelope Mawson who provided valuable detailed comments on earlier drafts.
Many thanks also to Mahbub Hossain, the Executive Director of BRAC, who
encouraged the authors to be ‘as critical as possible’. All errors remain those of
the authors.
Acronyms
ALP Alternative Learning Programme
ALREP Alternative Livelihood Rural Finance Programme
BEOC Basic Education for Older Children
BPHS Basic Package of Health Services
BRAC Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee
BRAC-RED BRAC-Research and Evaluation Division
CBDRR Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction
CFPR Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction
CGAP Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest
CHP Community Health Promoter
CHVs Community Health Volunteers
DevPro Development Professionals Program
DOSTANGO donor-state-NGO
EHC Essential Health Care
ELA Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents
FIDELIS Fund for Innovative DOTS Expansion through Local Initiatives

to Stop TB
FFTIG Food for Training and Income Generation
FINCA Foundation for International Community Assistance
06
HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired Immune Deficiency

Syndrome
IDP Internally Displaced Persons
ISDP Infrastructure and Social Development Programme
MISFA Microfinance Support Facility for Afghanistan
MFIs microfinance institutions
MoPH Ministry of Public Health
MoU memorandum of understanding
MRRD Ministry of Rehabilitation and Development
NFPE Non-formal Primary Education
NGO non-governmental organisation
NSP National Solidarity Programme
NWFP North-West Frontier Province
PDR Participation and Development Relations
SME small and medium enterprise
TA technical assistance
TB tuberculosis
WATSAN Water Supply and Sanitation
WFP World Food Programme
07
1 Introduction
1.1 Background: the new face of aid?
As the British media uses the term, an ‘aid worker’ refers to an employee of
Oxfam, Save the Children or a similarly recognisable brand of international non-
governmental organisation (NGO), usually working in emergency contexts in poor
countries, and typically European (or English-speaking and white). The kidnapping
of an aid worker in Afghanistan in 2007 was resoundingly ignored by the
international press, even though the kidnappings of German, Danish, Italian,
Canadian and French journalists and aid workers in the same year had been
closely covered. The difference for Nurul Islam was that he works for BRAC.1 And
BRAC is not (yet) a recognisable brand of international non-governmental
organisation; its staff are neither European, English-speaking nor white.
The issue of national origins, as well as matters of race and culture, are relevant
to the story this paper tries to tell. These are not matters that development studies
centrally addresses, despite their intrinsic significance in the cross-cultural, racial-
ly-charged face-to-face encounter that marks the development intervention.2 But
this paper also covers more conventional terrain of development management,
poverty reduction models, finance, scaling up and impact. At the core of the paper
is an attempt to grapple with how the unfamiliar issues of national origins, culture
and race interact with these more tractable matters of development NGO inter-
ventions. It is motivated by the jarring sensation created by BRAC’s expansion to
other poor developing countries since the 2000s: if Nurul Islam challenges notions
of ‘aid workers’, BRAC more generally challenges development theories of NGOs
and civil society.
The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of BRAC’s global expansion, a

process underway since the 2000s, and to reflect on what this expansion may tell
us about new directions in aid and development practice. The ‘challenge’ of the
title is twofold. First, are the challenges faced by BRAC as it seeks to expand its
activities to new countries.3 The account discusses the new kinds of aid and
development relationships that might, possibly, be engendered by the interesting
fact of BRAC’s Southern origins, as well as the challenges this brings. It also
considers the managerial challenges of transplanting managerial systems across
contexts, and the impact of the aid regime in the new countries. The second
1 An account of the kidnapping of Nurul Islam (written as ‘Noor Islam’) is given in Smillie (2009:
chapter 19).
2 Exceptions include Sarah White’s pioneering work on race in development. See also Eyben on aid
and relationships (2006).
3 There are now eight programme countries, in chronological order: Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri
Lanka, Uganda, Tanzania, Pakistan, southern Sudan, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Haiti is being
discussed as the next country, and a BRAC programme to tackle extreme poverty is already being
replicated there. There are also plans for BRAC UK to work in the UK with Tower Hamlets council in
east London, on an initiative to employ community health-workers (along the lines of BRAC’s
Shasthya Shebika model) (Sandra Kabir, interview, June 2009).
09
challenge is, perhaps, to current thinking about NGOs and development. The
paper discusses BRAC’s expansion in light of disappointment with NGO
performance in terms of delivering development ‘alternatives’, framed in one
recent account as NGOs having ‘hit a wall’ (Bebbington, Hickey and Mitlin 2008).
While the NGO literature offers some entry points for the analysis of the BRAC
case, there is little there to direct attention to the core distinctive aspect of BRAC’s
expansion: that it is a Southern organisation from a poor country expanding to
other poor Southern countries. BRAC may be another instance of the South in the
South – a transfer of development knowledge, technology or resources across
and between poor countries; it may be a relationship to which Northern institutions
and actors are secondary, other than as providers of finance. The many important
and interesting dimensions to South-South transfers – as the growing literature on
Chinese aid and investment in Africa demonstrates (Rohan and Power 2008) –
have yet to be addressed in the NGO literature, most likely because this is such a
new development within the NGO world.
The paper is in four parts. The introductory section outlines the approach taken to
exploring these issues. The second section gives a brief account of BRAC’s global
expansion, discussing whether this marks a trend, and how BRAC International
differs from other international NGOs. This section also offers an analysis of the
elements of the BRAC approach that enabled it to achieve the scale it did in
Bangladesh. The third section looks in some more detail at the challenges BRAC
has faced in its expansion, reviewing these in light of some debates about NGOs
in development. Section four concludes.
1.2 Approach, positionality and limitations

This paper was intended to be exploratory, and was motivated by the sense that
there was something interesting and new about BRAC’s global expansion, and an
inability to pinpoint precisely what this was. This means the paper opens up more
lines of inquiry than it is able to address, much space necessarily being devoted
to documenting the facts of the case. Part of the appeal of the subject is that it
forces ‘attention to detail and the specifics of power, history and context’, as we
witness BRAC’s attempts to transplant its programmes, honed in one particular
set of power relations, histories and contexts to an entirely new setting (Lewis and
Opoku-Mensah 2006: 670). The paper could have continued in a tradition of NGO
research by focusing very tightly on the organisational dynamics of growth;
instead, the paper brings into focus the policy and political context, including
relations between donors, the state and NGOs (Tvedt 2002: 2006).
The NGO and civil society literature suggested two areas as of specific relevance.
The first was a strong sense of disappointment among scholars and critical civil
society practitioners with the performance of NGOs as ‘alternatives’ (Bebbington
et al. 2008); in their volume, Bebbington et al. use the exact imagery of having ‘hit
a wall’, even while acknowledging that many NGOs still struggle and negotiate to
persist with alternative, transformational development strategies. This sense of
disappointment is echoed in a shift in donor interest away from civil society in the
2000s (Lewis and Opoku-Mensah 2006). This shift reflects some disappointment
with respect to the impact of aid to NGOs, as well as the rise of the security
10
agenda, which has meant reduced support for the liberal human rights agendas of
civil society in developing countries (Howell et al. 2008).
The second issue is, broadly, that of NGO ‘transnationality’. This includes insights
into how the emergence of ‘global civil society’ has re-shaped the role of NGOs
within international development discourse (Townsend 1999). Mawdsley et al.
document the surprising rapidity and ease of transfer of ideas and language
across NGOs in the south (2002). It seems possible that ‘transnationality’ has
supported – and perhaps motivated – BRAC’s expansionary project. There is
some reference also to the phenomenon this paper aims to explore – that of
Southern organisations expanding their activities internationally (Bebbington et al.
2008; Hulme 2008).
Transnationality is certainly relevant to the BRAC story, particularly if, as seems to

be the case, BRAC is merely an unusually large and prominent example of a
trend for ideas, technologies and resources to be transferred between Southern
countries. It is less easy to see how a story of disappointment around the role of
NGOs can apply to the present BRAC strategy; alternatively, it could be asked
whether BRAC has succeeded in breaking through the wall of NGO incapacity. If
so, why?
To tackle this question it is necessary to revisit, briefly, the question of BRAC’s

‘success’. It is beyond the scope of this paper to undertake a meaningful analysis
of impacts on income poverty, health and education, or of how their interventions
have shaped accountability in public service delivery. Overall, the paper avoids a
strongly normative position on the question of ‘success’ in this sense; in this it
hopes to avoid what Tvedt has roundly criticised as ‘a history of NGO activism,
producing ideology in favour’ of NGOs (2006: 679). Instead, the paper
concentrates on the question of why BRAC achieved what it has. This entails a
focus on management, including the management of expansion, and learning and
innovation, but also takes into account the issue of political space, which is always
in effect an issue for BRAC because of the sheer size of its ambitions.
This paper was motivated by the desire to tell – and explore – a story of change in
the real world on which to date no narrative structure or theoretical construct had
been imposed. It is, nevertheless, a partial account in two senses. First, there is
limited documentary evidence on BRAC’s global programmes to date.4 This partly
reflects the fact of BRAC’s unusual structure, size and orientation, and that,
therefore, it merits being treated as a unique outcome of its particular historical
and personal circumstances, rather than as a ‘hybrid’ type of organisation, a
treatment that would contribute to learning from its ‘positive deviance’, instead of
trying to pigeonhole it within a pre-set managerial category (Biggs and Lewis
2009). But perhaps because there has been so little attention to the issue, no
independent critical literature on the specific issue of BRAC’s international
programmes could be identified.
4 One journal article on BRAC Afghanistan (Chowdhury et al. 2006) explores the transfer of a
development model from one poor developing country to another. Smillie’s (2009) book-length account
of BRAC briefly documented the global expansion. A number of articles in the international print
media, and in American business journals have also been published.
11
Second, the authors of the paper are both partial insiders to BRAC, as well as
Bengalis. This predisposes both authors towards appreciation of the
achievements of this Bengali-origin organisation. It also afforded the authors some
insights from the position of having worked in the organisation, which permitted
more first-hand experience of the constraints and rewards of the organisation than
any amount of survey work could generate. This positions the research within a
‘tradition’ of close identification with the NGO being researched; while the present
paper may not have entirely avoided the pitfalls of ‘over-identification’ with the
NGO concerned, it is approached from a reflective awareness of our own biases
(Lewis and Opoku-Mensah 2006: 670).
Third, as exploratory research, no primary field research in BRAC International

Programmes was undertaken. The focus is on the views of senior management,
and not the perspectives of field staff or beneficiaries. The paper draws on the
following sources:
l Purposive interviews with BRAC Bangladesh and BRAC International

managers, as well as long-term observers of BRAC
l Firsthand experience and observation of BRAC programmes in Bangladesh

and Afghanistan. This included substantial interaction with management staff
over a four year period (2004–2008) and previous discussions with
international programme staff about the expansion experience
l Organisational material (annual reports, website material, research and

evaluation outputs)
l Other secondary literature, including blogs from visitors to the BRAC

International programme, academic and policy studies and documentation.
2 Going global: the birth of an

international organisation
At the time of writing, in June 2009, BRAC International as a formal entity has just
been established. This brings the organisational members of the BRAC group to
11: the eight ‘new’ countries that comprise BRAC International (Afghanistan,
Liberia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Southern Sudan, Tanzania and
Uganda), the parent Bangladesh organisation, where the Head Office remains,
and BRAC UK and BRAC USA, both of which are primarily geared towards
communications work and/or fundraising. Each new country organisation is also
registered under the various national legal frameworks in place. The Board of
BRAC International had recently met, and was beginning to develop the systems
and practices through which BRAC International would be governed and
managed. As the CEO of BRAC USA put it, they were involved in ‘midwifing’ the
new organisation into life.5
5 Interview with Susan Davis, 24 June 2009.
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2.1 BRAC in growth mode: motives and critics

Why is BRAC going global? It is difficult to get a very clear understanding of the
full range of motivations behind taking BRAC to an international stage. One way
of looking at the question is to reverse, and it to ask: why should a Southern NGO
not do what large Northern NGOs take for granted? F.H. Abed, the founder and
chairperson of BRAC, recounted how at a high-level international meeting, the
former Prime Minister of Canada had asked: ‘so has BRAC finished all the work in
Bangladesh? Why is Abed going to Africa?’ to which the former Prime Minister of
Sri Lanka had responded, ‘Do you think Southern NGOs can’t go anywhere else?
Is it only Northern NGOs that can go to other countries?’6
The clearest reason offered for expanding is confidence that the BRAC approach
offers a tested, broad approach to the problems of rural poverty, with management
systems flexible enough to adapt to the new country contexts, and with an in-built
drive for scale. This confidence has been matched by an expectation that there is
some space for BRAC with its ambitions of scale and extensive experience: few of
the ‘small and beautiful’ programmes to tackle poverty in the poorest developing
countries have gone to scale.7 In addition, there was the expectation that
fundraising would be relatively easy.
Going global does not appear to have been part of some grand strategy as much
as a series of experiences in new country contexts, brought about out of differing
circumstances. And it fit within a more generally global outlook, organisationally: in
one view, BRAC had always been very open to learning from other country and
other organisational experiences, to sharing in turn, and to ‘getting the best from
the world’, including by bringing in non-Bangladeshi staff.8
The way the narrative is told by F.H. Abed, the global strategy emerged in fits and
starts, with experience and lessons accumulating with each new country
programme. The expansion started with Afghanistan in 2002, with (for BRAC) the
advantages of the situation’s close resemblance to the post-war refugee work with
which BRAC started in Bangladesh, as well as the cultural and religious affinities
between Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Another senior manager presented the
expansionary motivations as those of a ‘social entrepreneur’:
It is a mixture of opportunity and need, just like any entrepreneur. But in our
case we look at opportunity and need not only in terms of being able to make
money, but in being able to make a social difference. So... I don’t think that its
because there have been huge calls for support from these countries, you
know, that ‘come and help us’, governments coming and telling us... 9
The use of the language of ‘social enterprise’ is problematic, including that some
of its dominant usages are distinctively different from the sense offered in the
6 Interview with F.H. Abed and Sandra Kabir, 25 June 2009.
7 Interview with F.H. Abed and Sandra Kabir.
8 Interview with Imran Matin, 29 July 2009.
9 Interview with Imran Matin, 29 July 2009.
13
quotation above. BRAC does not, for instance, engage in ‘social business’, but
sees ‘profits’ as reserves for growth. Similarly, its development projects are not
the projects of corporate social responsibility, but its core ‘business’.10
The Afghanistan programme was considered a success, and by 2006, BRAC was
reportedly one of the largest NGOs in the country. Four key lessons were drawn
from this experience, as documented by some of the key actors in BRAC senior
management at the time:
1 South-South collaboration worked, and that motivated, experienced

Bangladeshi development professionals could work successfully with
trained local staff to deliver a rapid programme expansion.
2 The basic elements of the BRAC development model worked and could
be replicated, once adapted to local conditions. In Afghanistan, schools
had to be for girls only, and the costs of delivering services were higher.
3 The value assigned to a philosophy of scale, to ‘serve as many people as

possible’, has been important for staff motivation.
4 Resource constraints can be overcome. BRAC Afghanistan initially

received a small grant from BRAC Bangladesh and donor funding
followed once results were demonstrated.
(Chowdhury, Alam and Ahmed 2006)
For BRAC, the Afghanistan adventure
has been very rewarding. It has confirmed that its development model can be
applied elsewhere, to great effect. Based on this positive experience, BRAC
is now setting up programmes in east Africa and Pakistan.
(Chowdhury, Alam and Ahmed 2006: 680)
BRAC’s experience with disaster relief and rehabilitation then took it to Sri Lanka
after the 2004 tsunami. While there had been no initial plan to remain in Sri
Lanka, where the need for BRAC services was deemed less pressing than in
other poorer countries, a gap in the microfinance market was identified, and
BRAC resolved to stay and to establish its ‘microfinance plus’ programme. BRAC
UK followed next in 2006, as did BRAC Uganda with microfinance and a non-for-
mal primary education programme for IDPs in northern Ugandan camps. In 2007,
BRAC Tanzania started work with microfinance and a health programme. Later
that year, BRAC USA was formed, an MoU was signed with the government of
NWFP in Pakistan to deliver a range of services, and credit work in Southern
Sudan also started. In 2008, Sierra Leone and Liberia programmes were also
started with microfinance activities. Essential health care, education, agriculture
and livestock, and programmes for adolescent girls have all been set up across
the five African country programmes (see Table 2.1 A chronology of BRAC’s
global expansion).
10 Many thanks to Martin Greeley for these points.
14
BRAC’s global expansion has its critics; perhaps because this process is not yet
very widely known, these have to date mainly been friendly critics. One criticism
that has been heard since the early period of expansion is that not only is there
still room for BRAC to further its work in Bangladesh, going global jeopardises the
management of both the home country programme and the new programmes, as
senior staff become increasingly over-stretched. There certainly seems to be truth
in the charge that management is stretched, and it is recognised within the
organisation. But rapid scaling up also tested the management capacities of
BRAC Bangladesh; to some extent, there seems to be a calculated risk that no
lasting damage will be done from the rapid extension to new contexts of the
responsibilities of senior managers.
While it remains too early to consider the question of the success or otherwise of
BRAC’s global adventure, it seems clear that parts of the Africa programme have
created new challenges, which are absorbing a great deal of senior management
energy and time. One is that resources have proven to be a constraint, or at least
not being generated as fast to keep pace with BRAC’s absorptive capacities.
Ongoing conflict and security threats in Afghanistan and Southern Sudan have
created significant difficulties for programmes and particularly staff in Afghanistan.
However, the BRAC expansion continues apace; new country programmes are
scaling up, new funding is being sought, and approaches are being experimented
with, some to be discarded, others retained.
Table 2.1 A chronology of BRAC’s global expansion
2002 l BRAC is invited by the Government of Afghanistan to assist in

post-conflict reconstruction of the country
l BRAC establishes education programmes in Southern Sudan

with UNICEF, providing technical assistance in curriculum design
and operational management.
May l BRAC sets up their two main microfinance projects – Microloans

2002 and Small Enterprise Loans for women from poor households,
assisted by Microfinance Support Facility for Afghanistan
(MISFA) and the Ministry of Rehabilitation and Development
(MRRD).
l The Alternative Livelihood Rural Finance Programme (ALREP) is

also set up to create counter the problem of opium cultivation.
l Infrastructure and Social Development Programme (ISDP) is set

up. The first project – National Solidarity Programme (NSP) in
six provinces is set up to assist the Government in strengthening
governance at the local community level.
July Educational Programme is started in Afghanistan

2002 l Basic Education for Older Children (BEOC)
15
l Non-Formal Primary Education (based on the successful NFPE

model implemented in Bangladesh)
2003 l BRAC becomes an active implementing partner with the Ministry

of Public Health (MoPH) of Afghanistan, in three provinces for
introducing the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS). The
programme subsequently expands to three more provinces.
l Becomes a principal recipient of the Tuberculosis and Malaria

Control Programme of Global Fund Round 8
l Agriculture and Livestock Programme is initiated in 12 provinces
l Afghanistan Training and Resource Centre is opened –

consisting of training and non-training interventions
Decem- l In response to the Tsunami, BRAC sets up disaster relief and

ber 2004 emergency livelihood programmes in Sri Lanka. After the
emergency, BRAC went on to establish microfinance
programmes through capacity building of local NGOs
l BRAC also agrees to provide technical support to establish

microfinance programmes in Aceh, Indonesia, in the aftermath of
the Tsunami.
January l BRAC UK is founded in London, UK, main areas of focus being

2006 – programme implementation among diaspora communities in
the UK, advocacy for development led by the South and
fundraising for BRAC programmes, primarily in Africa.
l The FIDELIS (Fund for Innovative DOTS Expansion through

Local Initiatives to Stop TB) project is set up in Afghanistan as
part of BRAC’s Health Programme
June l BRAC enters Africa for the first time, as it starts the Microfinance
2006 programme in Uganda, which now operates in 33 out of 83
provinces.
l The Alternative Learning Programme, modelled on the NFPE

Programme in Bangladesh, is set up at the request of local
authorities to address the urgent need for educational
opportunities for out-of-school children in Internally Displaced
Persons (IDP) camps.
Decem- BRAC establishes the Girl’s Education Project in Afghanistan to

ber 2006 focus specifically on encouraging enrolment of girls into formal
education and increasing literacy rates – which dropped to 15%
during the Taliban regime.
January l BRAC starts setting up Community-based Schools in

2007 11 provinces in Afghanistan (till December 2008)
16
l As part of the ISDP, Water Supply and Sanitation (WATSAN)

Project is set up in 8 districts of Kabul and Badghis province
l Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR) Project is

set up in Samangan Province in Afghanistan.
l BRAC also establishes Microfinance Programmes in Tanzania.
l The Essential Health Care (EHC) Programme is set up in

Tanzania to provide primary health care services to their
microfinance members, their families and wider communities –
focusing on Malaria, Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS, the
reduction of infant and under-five mortality rates, increasing
access to healthcare services and improving utilisation of
government health services.
l As a part of the health programmes in Tanzania, modelled on

the Shastha Shevika Model in Bangladesh, women from
Microfinance groups are trained to become Community Health
Promoters (CHPs).
March BRAC starts the Agriculture, Livestock and Poultry Programme in

2007 Tanzania. The programme operates through trained agricultural
extention farmers and model crop farmers, who are female
volunteers from microfinance groups to help other farmers.
April BRAC takes a historical step by signing the memorandum of

2007 understanding with the Government of Pakistan to set up
programmes in microfinance, education and health in two
provinces – Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
May 2007 BRAC starts a microfinance programme in Southern Sudan,

based on the success of its model in neighbouring countries,
Uganda and Tanzania. The solid organisational base in Uganda
helps to establish its operations smoothly.
July l BRAC USA is officially registered as an independent, non-profit

2007 organisation is the USA, for increasing visibility about BRAC’s
successful community development model in the global North,
mobilising resources and building business partnerships.
l The Essential Health Care (EHC) Programme is launched in

Uganda.
As a part of the health programmes in Uganda, based on the

successful replication of the Shastha Shevika Model in Tanzania,
women from microfinance groups are trained to become
Community Health Promoters (CHPs).
August BRAC sets up 10 offices in NWFP in Pakistan for the microfinance

2007 programme.
17
2008 l Launches an Essential Health Care Programme (EHC) in

Southern Sudan, based on the similar model in Uganda and
Tanzania.
l As a part of the health programmes in Southern Sudan, women

from microfinance groups are trained to become Community
Health Volunteers (CHVs).
l The Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescent (ELA)

Programme, aimed at teenage girls, is launched in Uganda and
Tanzania, based on its successful implementation in
Bangladesh. This programme focuses on providing income-
generation skills and life skills training, and creating
opportunities for earning their living. This is operated through
peer groups called adolescent development clubs, assisted by
microfinance groups.
l A regional Research and Evaluation Unit for Africa is established

in Kampala, Uganda.
l BRAC signs a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the

Uganda’s Vice-President’s office, reiterating BRAC’s role and
involvement in the Bonna Bagaggawale (Prosperity for All)
initiatives for eradicating poverty.
April l BRAC launches its own Education Programme in Southern

2008 Sudan, with the aim of opening of 1,000 non-formal primary
schools within five years.
l As an extension of ‘microfinance plus’* approach, a pilot

agriculture programme is launched in Southern Sudan, while
funding is being secured for a greater Agriculture, Livestock and
Poultry Programme.
As part of this programme, The Food for Training and Income

Generation (FFTIG) project, a combination of food aid and
training, was initiated to help households headed by widows. It
was an eight month initiative with World Food Programme.
May 2008 BRAC initiates its Agriculture and Livestock Programme in

Uganda, which is the most important source of income for women.
Its operation is similar to that of Tanzania.
Septem- MasterCard Foundation approves a two year partnership with

ber 2008 BRAC Uganda to scale up the ‘Microfinance Plus’ approach.
Novem- BRAC initiates its first programmes in Sierra Leone and Liberia,
ber 2008 both post-conflict countries – in Health, Agriculture and Livestock.
18
2009 l BRAC launches a $15 million poverty alleviation initiative in

post-conflict Sierra Leone and Liberia in partnership with the
Soros Economic Development Fund, Open Society Institute
West Africa, Omidyar Network, and Humanity United.
l Microfinance programmes are started in both Sierra Leone and

Liberia.
Ongoing Technical support is provided to India and Haiti on implementing

the Ultra Poor programme of BRAC Bangladesh. Technical
support is also given to Microfinance networks in Honduras and
Peru.
* ‘Microfinance Plus’ Approach involves provision of capital for credit in addition to livelihood development
services that increases people’s abilities to manage and expand their businesses.
2.2 ‘Southern’ international NGOs: a growing trend?

One possibility that this paper aimed to explore was that the internationalisation of
NGOs of Southern origin marked a growing trend of which BRAC is merely one
example. This proved to be difficult to verify, but there are signs of a trend.
2.2.1 South-South development organisational expansion

BRAC is not the first such example of a South-South transfer of a development
intervention model; the Grameen Bank replication model (through the Grameen
Trust and the Grameen Fund) means that it is not even the first example of an
organisation of Bangladeshi origin to have transmitted its knowledge, technology
and resources to other Southern countries. But this is an example of what David
Hulme has called ‘institution breeding’ as distinct from organisational expansion
(Hulme 1990).11 Among Bangladeshi microfinance institutions (MFIs), ASA has
also been developing a replication system internationally, including through
technical assistance to some 17 developing countries and the global MFI network
being built by ASA International (a limited liability company registered in Mauritius)
in Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines, Ghana and Nigeria, with plans to expand to
Pakistan, Nepal, Yemen, Indonesia and Afghanistan.12 Global microfinance
networks have been particularly effective vehicles for spreading service provision
models developed and refined in poor countries across other poor countries,
through networks such as FINCA (Foundation for International Community
Assistance) (whose founder is North American).
11 Many thanks to David Lewis for this point.
12 Information from ASA website (www.asa.org.bd/global.html; accessed 26 June 2009) and from Martin
Greeley (personal communication).
19
Table 2.2 A rough typology of ‘Southern’ international NGOs
Key features Examples

MFI replication Learning about microfinance FINCA, Grameen replication,
networks models replicated across ASA replication
developing countries through
technical assistance, promo-
tion, loan funds and grants
Diaspora- Ethnic and religious minority MuslimAid, Islamic Relief, Aga

based communities in the developed Khan Foundation/Aga Khan
organisation world financing and staffing Rural Support Programme
programmes in developing
countries
Decentralised Northern International NGOs ActionAid

Northern shifting the locus of organisa-
International tional power south
NGOs
Southern Service delivery and advocacy BRAC International

NGOs with NGOs originating in the South
offices in the expanding organisationally into
North and other Southern countries
other develop-
ing countries
While BRAC is not the first Southern organisation to transfer knowledge or

resources to other countries in the South, evidence to support the idea of a trend
is not readily available. See Table 2.2 for an initial attempt at typologising
Southern international NGOs. Within the microfinance world BRAC’s Southern
expansion is unremarkable, because global replication programmes are an
established feature of the industry. However, these programmes are often
minimalist ‘build-operate-transfer’ or technical assistance models,13 and do not
involve the transfer of full-scale management systems and organisational culture,
including trained personnel. BRAC’s activity is distinct from other global
microfinance networks in that:
l Unlike the Grameen replication programme, it has not replicated a technology

or a model through partner institutions (although the BRAC Challenging the
Frontiers of Poverty Reduction (CFPR) programme is also doing that), but
through the creation of entirely new organisations. In fact, one explanation for
BRAC’s organisational expansion is that it had a somewhat dissatisfactory
experience with the provision of technical assistance (TA) to a UNICEF
project in Southern Sudan on non-formal education; it was felt then that they
might not have been very good at providing TA, and could do a great deal
13 Many thanks to Susan Davis for pointing this out.
20
more if it really got to understand the problems and tried to tackle them in its
own way.
l Unlike the FINCA network, the origins of BRAC, including its founder and
senior management, are Southern. As will be discussed below, the personal
characteristics, including the national origins of staff, have some significance
for their relationships.
l Unlike most microfinance networks, the expansion has involved a wide range
of development interventions, at least some of which emerge from in-country
(donor, government or other) demand. This entails that the BRAC expansion
is more significant and complex than the neat sharing of the spare, elegant,
globally tested microfinance models.14 The BRAC model is increasingly being
promoted under the rubric ‘Microfinance Plus’. BRAC’s global expansion,
while strongly focused on microfinance, is far from an example of a pure
microfinance institution internationalising its model.
l BRAC’s global expansion has entailed an organisational expansion, with all

the attendant complexities and scaling up of management, human resources,
monitoring, research and evaluation that implies.
2.3 How BRAC differs from other international NGOs

In organisational terms, BRAC’s international expansion resembles what happens
when a Northern NGO (an Oxfam, HelpAge International, Plan International etc)
expands into new countries, with two caveats. First, international NGOs
increasingly work through local partners, rather than seeking to set up their own
frontline service provision (Mawdsley et al. 2002). This has inevitably led to
concerns that the relationship between local and Northern international NGOs has
recreated the negative, power-laden dimensions of donor-recipient relations
(Bebbington et al. 2008). BRAC’s strategy is to create entire new frontline
organisations in the new countries, rather than to act as brokers for international
aid. Such a strategy is hardly problem-free; the numbers of Bangladeshi staff in
the international programmes are small, but it is proving hard to retain good local
staff in the new countries. Bangladeshis are still being recruited to work in other
country programmes; this includes some freshly-recruited staff from Bangladesh,
who therefore cannot be presumed to bring the experience which could arguably
be claimed as a core component of their advantage in the service delivery market.
A second difference between BRAC and other international NGOs is that many of
the latter have moved away from direct service delivery towards ‘strategic’
high-end policy or rights-based advocacy work since the 1990s. While the
rationale, particularly the pursuit of rights-based and pro-poor policy agendas
through ‘civil society’ type pressure activities, may have been sound, the
withdrawal from frontline services – from ‘doing development’ – arguably comes at
14 The universal or template nature of microfinance models is testified to by the easy comparability and
categorisation of MFIs in the information and other resources offered by the Consultative Group to
Assist the Poorest (CGAP) and Mix Market.
21
some costs to organisational access to people’s realities, and therefore

organisational capacities to effect a significant difference. A relevant difference
between BRAC and other international NGOs here is that BRAC’s headquarters
are in the same country as their biggest programme, which does not seem to be
the case for other international development NGOs.15
It is with respect to the issue of the scale and ambition of their field activities –
their service delivery – that BRAC management sees the sharpest distinction
between its own international programme and those of other international NGOs.
In the view of BRAC senior managers, BRAC International is more ambitious than
other international NGOs. Some BRAC staff jokingly criticise INGOs as having
‘flag-planting’ tendencies, by which they mean that country programmes enable
organisations to demonstrate that they ‘work in X country’, but these are in fact so
modest in scale and ambition – ‘small and beautiful’, as Mr Abed ironically
described them – as to be able to effect a very small difference for very few
people.
It is interesting that in their expansionary move, BRAC did not appear to have
considered that in other countries, there may be less space for NGO service
delivery, national or international. In interviews with F.H. Abed and Imran Matin, it
seemed that the possibility of resistance to NGOs delivering services, for example
on grounds of undermining state accountability, had not been fully considered.
The situation is different for global microfinance networks, but these appear to
have become increasingly distanced from international NGO concerns, perhaps
partly in response to new relationships to private sector sources of funding.
It is not that BRAC did not have to work to carve out the space for its programmes
in Bangladesh. The joke is that BRAC is ‘second government’ – a half-admiring
dig at BRAC’s relentless expansion and diversification. But within BRAC, and
among some who have directly observed the effects of their services on public
service delivery, there is a belief that these have complemented government
efforts through partnerships, ‘demonstration effects’, serving areas and groups
government cannot or will not; possibly also, through competitive pressures on
government to expand access to its services (mainly primary education).16
In this context it is interesting to consider how BRAC’s global expansion may have
been affected by the Paris Agenda. BRAC’s experience to date appears to
suggest that bilateral aid has been less easily available than had been expected,
based on the Bangladesh and Afghanistan experiences. This is substantially
because of budget support and sector wide programmes, but also because there
is less space for NGO service delivery in these new countries than in Bangladesh,
always with the caveat of post-conflict zones in which there is more space for
effective service delivery organisations.
15 Many thanks to Penelope Mawson for pointing this out.
16 Smillie (2009) documents the partnerships around diarrhoea and tuberculosis treatment, as well as the
challenges faced by the BRAC education programme in working with government. The rapid growth of
BRAC non-formal primary schools in the 1990s has been cited as a competitive pressure on
government to widen access to the government education system (Hossain, Subrahmanian and
Kabeer 2002).
22
BRAC International may, then, be spearheading a trend towards the inter-

nationalisation of Southern NGO activity which is distinct from, and more
extensive than the global MFI networks that have to date dominated the space for
South-South development transfers. But there are as yet no close competitors. In
its own language, BRAC is confident about its own unique position, a confidence
which appears to be based on fundraising achievements to date:
With the success of BRAC USA and BRAC UK, BRAC will be the world’s first
international development organization initiated and led by people from the
developing world with solidarity and support from the developed world.
(BRAC USA website: www.brac.net/usa/about_us.php, accessed 26 June

2009)
This vision statement leaves no doubt that the critical points here are (a) the
international dimension; and (b) leadership by the developing world; interestingly,
(c) ‘solidarity’ with the developed world is also an important part of the story.
2.4 How BRAC scaled up: the Bangladesh story

The story of BRAC going global makes most sense with some understanding of
the scale of BRAC operations in Bangladesh, and the factors behind its expansion
nationally. This section will sketch BRAC’s history in Bangladesh; readers who
require more information may refer to more detailed accounts of BRAC’s
Bangladesh programme.17 It should be noted that while BRAC is the largest, there
are a number of other big Bangladeshi NGOs, many of which have ‘scaled up’ for
reasons and in ways that resemble that of BRAC, and were enabled by similar
factors, particularly the political space and availability of aid (see Zaman 2004 for
an account of the scaling up of microfinance in Bangladesh).
BRAC was founded in the war-torn newly independent Bangladesh in 1972,

initially as a committee of volunteers trying to contribute to rehabilitation among
returning refugees in Sulla in Sylhet district. In the 37 years since its modest
beginnings, BRAC has expanded and diversified into a large, complex
organisation, covering all 64 districts of the country. The scale and complexity of
its operations within Bangladesh make it difficult to capture; Box 2 summarises
key highlights in its history.
BRAC currently frames its core approach as ‘microfinance plus’. This means that
BRAC provides credit and savings facilities, the returns from which support its
other social mission. A key feature of this support is the physical infrastructure,
human resources and managerial functions the microfinance office can provide.
BRAC is by no means the lean credit machine that ASA, for example, has
perfected. While there is a Fordist aspect to BRAC, in its homogeneous frontline
offices and multi-level monitoring systems, it is a messier and more complex
17 General accounts: Chowdhury et al. (2006) on the original motivations for the BRAC Afghanistan
programme; Smillie (2009); Lovell (1992); Smillie and Hailey (2001); Chen (1986); DFID BINGO
reviews (Thornton et al. 2000; Verulam Associated Ltd 2005); World Bank (2006).
23
organisation than ‘pure’ microfinance institutions like ASA. This messiness and
complexity arises from the layering on to the basic microfinance platform a wide
range of social services: livelihoods training; formal and non-formal, pre-, primary,
secondary and higher education; sanitation and public health education; primary
health care services; rights and legal education, legal aid, and institution-building
and coalition-building. It has a large, complex programme for the ultra poor, which
aims to tackle the multiple dimensions of the most severe forms of deprivation.
Through its commercial activities BRAC provides backward linkages to agricultural
inputs and forward linkages with markets. BRAC operates a commercial bank,
initially with a small and medium enterprise (SME) focus, but now a widening
range of products, including migrant remittance services.
BRAC started developing profit-making enterprises in support of its social mission

early on (see Table 2.3). The dairy plant, for instance, was established in order to
process and retail milk products from members’ cows purchased using micro-
credit.18 BRAC appears to have been moderately effective at generating profits
and recycling surpluses in support of its social mission (World Bank 2006). One
study concluded that equity considerations were central to BRAC’s enterprises,
and that these ‘often set a price floor even when market conditions change’ to
protect poor producers; this market distortion ‘is justified on equity grounds, given
the organization’s overall poverty reduction mandate’ (cited in World Bank 2006:
55). Widespread criticism has extended to legal challenges to BRAC Bank
(ultimately over-ruled by the courts), and includes the implications for reputation,
competition and commercial viability:
Relative to other NGOs, BRAC’s significantly large portfolio is a manifestation

of top management’s corporate and business background, a conviction that
such deviation from social development efforts is desirable both for the
organization and society at large, and the belief that it will contribute to
sustainability... A closer look at [BRAC businesses’] financial data suggests
that their returns are only modest... The challenge of deficit financing, and in
many cases exiting the market, is an important consideration that cannot be
overlooked by NGOs contemplating business ventures. What also cannot be
eschewed is the perception among many stakeholders that BRAC’s
wholesome image of an institution representing the poor, and an innovator in
social development and empowerment, has been compromised. BRAC and
others have deviated from their core objectives by involving themselves in
business operations, which may undermine their acceptability and
effectiveness, many allege.
(Verulam Associates 2005)
While the financial returns from BRAC’s market ventures are limited and may
contribute little directly to financing its social mission, profits from its microfinance
programme are used to subsidise ‘soft’ and smaller sized loans for poorer people.
In the mid-2000s it was estimated that BRAC loans were on average 40 per cent
smaller than those of ASA (World Bank 2006), and a higher proportion were
18 See Smillie (2009) for detailed accounts of the origin of some of these enterprises.
24
reaching the very poor (Verulam Associates 2005: 29). BRAC’s for-profit activities
are relevant for its current move towards reframing its role as that of ‘social enter-
prise’ (see Table 2.3 – A chronology of BRAC in Bangladesh).
Table 2.3 A chronology of BRAC in Bangladesh
1972 The Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee was founded to

help returning refugees.
1973 From rehabilitation to development. After working with refugees to

rebuild their livelihoods, BRAC was renamed Bangladesh Rural
Advancement Committee, to reflects its new focus on long term rural
community development.
1974 First loans provided in the microcredit plus approach, with 300 staff.
The programme began to expand beyond Sylhet.
1975 Research and Evaluation Division set up.
1975 BRAC starts to experiment with different approaches to rural

development in Jamalpur and Manikganj.
1975 BRAC
1977 Member-based village organisations set up.
1977 Aarong – retail outlet for handicraft producers – opened.
1977 Shasthya shebika (volunteer healthworker) programme introduced
1977 First training centre for staff and members established
1978 Poultry and livestock activities started
1979 Oral therapy extension programme (oral saline) developed.
1980s Business ventures to support BRAC programmes and add value to

enterprises of members established, including cold storage facility, printing
press, iodised salt factory, tissue culture laboratory, and a cattle breeding
station.
1984 Pilot TB control project started to complement Government programme
1985 First BRAC one-room schools opened in 22 villages
1986 Social development programme including training on human rights for

women
1989 Oral rehydration solution used in diarrhoea cases was reaching

13 million out of a total of 15 million households after a decade of the ORT
programme.
1991 Women’s health development programme established
25
1994 Tuberculosis treatment programme. BRAC implemented the

Government TB programme
1994 Replication of BRAC non-formal education programmes in Africa
1995 Shushasthyas Health centres set up
1998 Legal aid clinics
1998 Dairy plant to process milk from members’ cows. Now processing
70,000 litres per day
1998 Programmes extended to indigenous communities in the Chittagong

Hill Tracts
1990s Scaling up: microfinance, health, education and social development

programmes scaled up to all 64 districts and 69,000 villages
2001 BRAC Bank. Commercial banking supporting small and medium

enterprises
2001 BRAC University established
2002 Targeting the Ultra Poor: an integrated programme to address

extreme poverty was established in the northwest, expanding in 2007 to
15 districts
Source: Adapted from BRAC (www.brac.net/index.php?nid=11; accessed 29 June 2009).
A more recent arena of growth has been civil society activism, through the
establishment of the BRAC Advocacy and Human Rights Unit in 2002 and BRAC
University and its associated research institutes.19 Compared to other NGOs,
including many international NGOs operating within Bangladesh, it is uncon-
troversial to argue that BRAC has to date been less prominent with respect to civil
society advocacy, particularly around good governance issues, than might be
expected from an organisation of its size and clout. But it would be to overstate
the matter to suggest that BRAC focuses on service delivery to the exclusion of
other, more deeply political structural issues. Underlying and informing BRAC’s
overall strategy has often been some grounded political analysis, although BRAC
has never been known as a heavyweight in national governance debates. It has
relatively recently entered the arena, however, with its Institute (formerly Centre)
for Governance Studies, based at BRAC University, which has provided
19 These include (i) the Institute for Educational Development, which participates in the production of the
annual Education Watch report by the Campaign for Popular Education since 1999; (ii) the Institute of
Governance Studies, which has published an annual report on The State of Governance in
Bangladesh since 2006; (iii) the James P. Grant School of Public Health, which is gaining a global
reputation for innovation in public health education, and which also publishes the Health Equity Watch
report; and BRAC Development Institute, which has a wider mandate, but is focused on research and
training around practical solutions to poverty in the global South (BRAC 2009).
26
postgraduate training on governance and development to civil servants, as well as

publishing the annual review, State of Governance in Bangladesh report series,
since 2006. And in other ways BRAC’s political analysis has had considerable
influence, both within and beyond the organisation.20
2.4.1 ‘Small may be beautiful, but big is necessary’

It is impossible to tell the BRAC story without resort to statistics: it is substantially
a story of large numbers. A much-favoured dig of Abed, the founder/CEO of
BRAC, is at Schumacher’s ‘small is beautiful’; this may be so, he is quoted as
saying, ‘but big is necessary’. Figure 2.1 provides some sense of the financial size
of BRAC, with 2008 expenditure reaching more than US$500 million. Donor
grants amounted to 34 per cent of total income in 2008, slightly less than the
contribution from microfinance service charges (US$144 compared to US$150
million; BRAC 2009). It should be noted that the declining relative significance of
donor support reflects the growing importance of cost recovery in the microfinance
programme, rather than declining absolute donor support. In fact, between 2000
and 2005, BRAC’s share of donor support to the 15 big NGOs increased from
55 to 60 per cent (Verulam Associates 2005).
There are more than 115,000 BRAC employees, including teachers, in

Bangladesh alone. This excludes volunteers and para-professionals (who earn on
the job) and around 6,000 staff working in the international programmes. The
scale of BRAC’s activities is hard to capture; a recent monograph had to skim
lightly across decades of development work and new international programmes in
order to be able to tell a coherent story (see Smillie 2009). A DFID-sponsored
report on the Big NGOs noted that BRAC ‘is in a league of its own’ in terms of
size and budget (Verulam Associates 2005: 7). For many, BRAC’s ambitions are
consistent with its 20-storey tower in Dhaka, for others this is a symbol of the
failure of NGOs to generate ‘alternatives’ – home-grown, transformational
strategies of change, led by committed bands of activists. David Lewis and
Nazneen Kanji’s recent book Non-governmental Organisations and Development
captures this contrast with a photograph of the undeniably corporate-styled BRAC
tower early in the text: the caption reads: ‘BRAC Headquarters, Dhaka,
Bangladesh’; it seems that the image speaks for itself, as no other commentary is
provided (Lewis and Kanji 2009).
Analysis of the factors behind the scale of BRAC’s Bangladesh programme has
centred on three aspects of the organisation: management, capacity development
and innovation. A fourth, that of political space has to date, received less
attention. We look now at each of these in turn.
20 The Net, an account of how patronage and power create dependency in rural Bangladesh, remains
influential (BRAC 1980). Within BRAC, field-level political analysis of the local constraints to a
programme for the extreme poor led to an important innovation in its activities (Hossain and Matin
2005).
27
Figure 2.1 BRAC budget and share of donor contribution,

1980–2008
600
500
400
Amount (US$ million)

300
Share of donor
contribution (% of
200 total)
100
97
100 68
54
21 24 2027
0
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
Source: BRAC: BRAC At A Glance (March 2009) (www.brac.net/index.php?nid=16, accessed 29 June

2009).
Management
Those familiar with the highly professional financial operations of BRAC will be
unsurprised to learn that its founder, F.H. Abed, had been a private sector
executive (Shell Oil) with a background in accountancy. Financial accountability
has always been an organisational strength, and the practices of financial
accountability have extended to strong systems of performance accountability
throughout the organisation, notable for its tight internal controls and close
monitoring mechanisms at every level (Zaman 2004).21 The organisation is
audited internally and externally, and recently won a prize from CGAP at the
World Bank for its financial transparency.
In their analysis of why microcredit programmes work so effectively, Jain and

Moore conclude that while part of the answer lies in the nature of the service
(homogenous, easily-quantifiable performance), two other factors matter: regular,
close daily monitoring of fieldworkers, and encouraging good work performance
by ‘increasing the extent to which the staff identify with [the organisation] and its
mission’ (2003: 19). This management strategy of encouraging identification with
the organisation’s mission is clearly present in the BRAC case, and many of the
features of effective microcredit programme management identified by Jain and
Moore (2003) apply to BRAC, including:
21 Zaman’s point is not specifically about BRAC, but about big NGOs and MFIs in Bangladesh; it may
also apply to Grameen Bank, ASA, Proshika and others (2004). See also Jain and Moore (2003).
28
l Celebrating organisational success (promotes staff identification with the

mission)
l ‘Campus’-style living field arrangements, preventing staff from feeling socially

isolated, creating a relatively flat frontline management structure in which
living conditions and rules apply equally across all staff, and creating peer
pressure for performance and maintaining rules
l A strong emphasis on field visits by headquarters or senior management staff

(Jain and Moore 2003: 19–20). Despite strong monitoring systems for feeding
quantitative performance indicators up to senior management, in BRAC
management culture there is no substitute for field visits and grounded
programme knowledge. In the authors’ experience, regular field visits are
unquestionably a core management activity. Even top-tier managers can often
display a highly detailed knowledge, not only of the overall programme, but of
individual programme beneficiaries and their circumstances.
There have been concerns about the governance of the big NGOs, including
BRAC, in Bangladesh, including that many are hierarchical organisations lacking
the space for direct staff participation or for accountability downward, to clients or
members. A recent DPhil thesis explored these issues in relation to gender equity,
and concluded that formal mechanisms for accountability to women members
were more or less absent in BRAC. However, it also found that some staff was
responsive to pressures for accountability informally, based on their social
connections to clients or members.22 There have also been concerns that the
visionary and charismatic first generation leaders of the NGO movement in
Bangladesh continue to wield overwhelming organisational control (for example
Verulam Associates 2005; Siddiqi 2001). However, one analysis of big South
Asian NGOs undermines the view that strong, personality-driven leadership in
Bangladeshi NGOs has led to authoritarian forms of management. Smillie and
Hailey’s observations were instead that leadership of successful NGOs tends to
be characterised by capacities for listening, responding, managing multifunctional
teams and delegating (Smillie and Hailey 2001; also World Bank 2006). The
Smillie and Hailey characterisation fits with what one of the authors has herself
observed in five years of working for and with BRAC: the views of staff lower
down the hierarchy feed effectively up the chain.23
Staff capacity development

A second strength of the BRAC Bangladesh programme is in its staff capacity
development strategy. BRAC and other NGOs do not pay high salaries compared
22 Personal communication with Sohela Nazneen, based on her 2007 DPhil thesis, ‘Gender Sensitive
Accountability of Service Delivery NGOs: BRAC and Proshika in Bangladesh’, Institute of
Development Studies.
23 Mobile telephones appear to have facilitated this flow of information. When one of the authors was
working for BRAC in 1994–5, communications between field and head offices were definitely con
strained by the lack of landline telephones. Returning to BRAC in the 2000s, she found that the mass
use of mobile telephones had sped up communications, and made a number of management
functions easier and faster.
29
to government or other private sector employment, nor are there significant

material perks of the job. BRAC’s strategy has been to invest substantially in
training, including external training opportunities for high-performing staff (Smillie
2009). This is partly significant because much middle and senior management has
come up through the ranks (ibid.). The issue of staff capacity development
emerges prominently in discussion of the challenges facing BRAC’s global
expansion. The LeAD and DevPro training programmes have been geared
towards building middle management capacity with this in mind.24 BRAC
managers explain that they are exploring new ways of attracting and retaining
national staff in Tanzania and Uganda; these are labour markets in which people
with education and professional experience are in greater demand than was the
case in Bangladesh, with its large supply of the educated unemployed.
Innovation
In 1980, when there were only 378 BRAC staff members, David Korten was the
first to identify a striking BRAC quality – that it is a ‘learning organisation’. Korten
noted an ‘unusual capacity for rapid learning through the constant identification,
acknowledgement, and correction of its own errors’ (1980: 488). The theme was
taken up and further developed in relation to the BRAC expansion by Catherine
Lovell in 1992. Smillie and Hailey (2001) and Smillie (2009) reiterated the idea
that BRAC as an organisation has an unusual capacity to innovate and adapt
based on learning about what works. Capacity to learn is supported by the
proximity of senior management to the ground, which enables senior managers
and field staff to communicate constantly about what is working (or otherwise). In
one of the present author’s experience, it can be a source of some frustration for
programme evaluation teams that programme designs change so fast and so
seamlessly that this complicates any simple impact assessment model, based on
assumptions of a stable programme design being implemented in pre-planned
ways. By the time a programme hits the ground it is likely to have gone through
several iterations since its original proposal.
Capacity to learn has also been supported by the long-standing support – and
often critical perspective – afforded by the fact of an in-house research and
evaluation division. BRAC-RED was established early on during BRAC
Bangladesh’s expansion, and has been viewed as one important factor in its
learning, auto-evaluation, and its innovations. Again, learning, adaptation and
innovation seem likely to be critical to how BRAC International approaches the
new challenges.
24 The LeAD training programme, which aimed to build a new cadre of development leaders to supply
BRAC’s growing needs for strong managers, emerged out of critical reflection and to support forward
planning. Yet early on it lost its distinctiveness and separate status, and become folded into BRAC’s
regular staff training (David Lewis, personal communication). The present research could not confirm
whether this was because LeAD itself lacked powerful champions within BRAC, or because it was
concluded that there was more value to be had from learning-by-doing.
30
Political space
BRAC and other large NGOs and MFIs were able to go to scale in Bangladesh
partly because of the unusual freedom with which they were able to operate. The
space for NGO services first opened up significantly during the Ershad military
regime of (1982–90), when donors, disappointed with the pace of progress on
poverty reduction, began to push for more room for NGO activities (Barry 1988;
Sanyal 1991). The lack of tight regulation on microfinance was another critical
dimension of this space (World Bank 2006; Zaman 2004). The importance of the
regulatory space has been brought home to BRAC in its efforts to expand
microfinance activities in Africa, where regulations, particularly on savings
services, are considerably tighter.25
There is no shortage of domestic criticism of NGOs and microfinance.26 Given the

sustained public critique of NGOs, both from the political left (seeking a more
radical strategy; see Hashemi and Hassan 1999) and the religious-political right
(who clashed with NGOs over their adherence to Western cultural values in the
early 1990s) it may be remarkable that NGO services have been able to expand
as they have in Bangladesh. Certainly, national elite involvement and support in a
context of abundant aid have helped to maintain a significant space open for
NGOs (Hossain 2005). This space has included a role in the provision of services
for which there are strong arguments that the state should supply. This entails the
critical ‘franchise state’ notion, in which the lines of accountability between citizen
and state are blurred (Wood 1997).
The political space for NGOs raises questions of how governments of Bangladesh
have come to accommodate these programmes – if we do not accept that donor
pressure is absolute and that aid-dependent governments entirely lack agency. In
this case, an unexplored question has been that of the degree of institutional ‘fit’
between government and BRAC (Houtzager 2005). At the frontline, relationships
between NGO staff and government officials can be functional and friendly (see
White 1999); while at higher levels, the line is officially hostile, particularly in the
populist critique of microfinance interest rates. But in practice, it seems more
plausible to argue that BRAC and the Government of Bangladesh enjoy a
reasonably good ‘fit’, institutionally. The relationship varies across sectors – strong
partnerships in public health, pre-primary education and social protection,
compared to enduring antagonism in primary education, for instance. But as noted
above, within BRAC, the view has been that their role complements public
services. It is interesting that in an effort to defend NGO service delivery activities,
David Hulme drew on the example of BRAC:
25 Imran Matin, BRAC International Deputy Executive Director, 29 July 2009.
26 In addition to widespread popular suspicion of organisations that handle resources intended for the
poor, and of media exposés and other less serious critiques, there have been a number of more
serious efforts to analyse the accountability of NGOs in Bangladesh, starting with Hashemi (1995).
More recently, there have been a Transparency International Bangladesh study levelling serious
charges of corruption against NGOs; the World Bank (2006) study; the two DFID Bangladesh Big
NGO studies (DFID 2000; Verulam Associates 2005); and from the BRAC stable, the State of
Governance in Bangladesh 2007 report (IGS 2008).
31
I have ‘changed my spots’ over the years... my concerns about NGOs

undermining processes of public sector reform and state formation have
reduced. For example, the concerns I had about BRAC substituting for the
state in Bangladesh have evaporated. BRAC provides services that ideally I
think the state should provide (primary education and basic health services)
as well as services the private sector should provide (cash transmission and
ISP services). However, I do not believe it is ‘crowding out’ the state or the
market: there is plenty of unmet demand for such services if the public and/or
private sectors in Bangladesh get their acts together. And the ideas, systems
and staff of BRAC are resources on which the state and private sector can
draw in the future.
(Hulme 2008: 338)
In at least some of its new countries, particularly those not experiencing post-con-
flict conditions, BRAC appears to have run up against the confines of the political
space in which it must operate. These limits have included the obvious facts of
the relatively tight microfinance regulatory regimes. But they also include the
(compared to Bangladesh) narrower space for NGOs service delivery. This is not
a space that BRAC is currently well-positioned to enlarge, as a new actor with
markedly foreign (if not Northern) origins.
3 The challenges of going global

3.1 Adapting to new contexts: how important is ‘Southernness’?
The single most striking aspect of BRAC’s global adventure is the Southern
identity of the new entrants. It is precisely because the management, both the
senior operational management back in Dhaka and the frontline management in
the new countries, are Bangladeshi, that the BRAC expansion merits attention.
But in practice, how does this ‘Southernness’ play out in the key relationships that
need to be forged, with communities, national staff, aid donors, national civil
society and government actors? It may be too soon to judge this issue; only the
Afghanistan programme has been in place longer than five years. But a number of
issues emerge as of interest, keeping in mind the analysis above of the elements
of BRAC’s expansion in Bangladesh.
One is that Bangladeshi BRAC staff do not receive what are by local standards,
high international NGO salaries. They are paid twice what they would earn in
Bangladesh, as well as modest expenses, a total which could not amount to half
the salary of a UK-based international NGO. Nor does BRAC follow the stringent
and costly security rules of other international actors, such as the UN system or
international NGOs. Part of the reasoning behind this is that Bangladeshi aid
workers are less obvious targets, even in Africa where they are racially distinct,
than white aid workers would be. This is one reason BRAC offers to explain their
success in establishing non-formal education programmes in the Internally
Displaced Persons camps in northern Uganda, where other NGOs appear to have
been unable or unwilling to base programmes.
32
All of this entails that BRAC staff rarely live amongst or socialise much with other
actors within this system, with the possibility that this may curtail their acceptance
within civil society and policy spaces. The ‘Southern salary’ advantages are not
purely those of cost-effectiveness, however; it is possible that the smaller
economic distance between Bangladeshi staff and the communities in which they
work may bring the managerial advantages of closer contact with beneficiaries.
That many Bangladeshi BRAC International staff speak limited English also
matters with respect to how they engage at the centre; it is interesting that this is
not a prominent concern for BRAC management, who consider it more important
for their International staff to learn local languages than English: in Afghanistan,
Bangladeshis tend to learn Dari (which has similarities to Bangla), and French
language training is also being considered, with the planned Haiti expansion in
mind.
Second, the implications of campus-style living arrangements, a core feature of

the BRAC frontline office set-up, may differ when there are relations between
national staff and their Bangladeshi managers to take into account. It will be
instructive to see how the transplanted arrangement fares if national and
Bangladeshi staff live and eat separately,27 and whether they retain their
management and organisational cultural benefits when marked with cultural
difference (Jain and Moore 2003). These are issues that BRAC management
appear to be considering while they experiment with adaptations to the new
contexts.
Third is the possibility that solidarity around the shared experience of

‘Southernness’ will lead to different ways of relating. This appears to have been a
feature of the Afghanistan experience, where BRAC was welcomed in part as
from a fellow Muslim South Asian nation. There, BRAC staff emphasise the
elements of their identity and national history that they believe Bangladeshis
share with Afghans – Sunni Islam, conflict, poverty, a history of suspicion of the
Pakistani state.28 BRAC does not play up the Southern connections. It is diffident
about its role in helping to establish the Afghanistan programme: Chowdhury et al.
write that ‘the name of Bangladesh, a Muslim country with some historic ties and
with no strategic interest in Afghanistan, may have played a positive role’ in
helping to establish the programme (2006: 679). But it is clear, nonetheless, that
this shared Southernness has some basis. Staff seem to find this common ground
helps them to gain acceptance within communities, to the extent that BRAC
depends on communities to protect their workers, rather than elaborate security
27 Imran Matin describes how the process of entering a new country starts with two BRAC staff being
sent for six months to register the new NGO and find out how to get things done. An important part of
this, he says, is finding the right food, and teaching someone to cook it. The BRAC office in Jalalabad,
Afghanistan served excellent Bengali fish dishes to one of the present authors, in a region where fish
is rarely eaten.
28 Cathy Shutt notes that similar claims of commonality are sometimes made among the community of
Filipino aid professionals in southeast Asia (personal communication).
29 BRAC’s security problems in Afghanistan appear to have related more to ordinary criminality rather
than to political objectives, perhaps because as was seen in the opening paragraph, Bangladeshi
hostages are likely to carry less weight than European or North American ones.
33
arrangements. As the kidnapping of Nurul Islam and the killing of two other
workers has shown, this is not a perfect strategy.29 But even in that instance, the
importance of shared religion and culture was apparent:
Noor had learned Dari, but his captors spoke Pashto, so communication was
almost impossible... On one occasion, he was taken to meet his captors’
commander, a man named Abdullah... He told Abullah, ‘I am a Muslim, and I
am in Afghanistan not to fight, but to promote microfinance for the
development of the people.’ He told them, ‘My father’s name is Abdul Gaffer
Mollah.’ They replied, ‘Oh, you are a mullah... Good!’. But more weeks would
pass in the dark cave.
(Smillie 2009: 223)
It has been far harder to establish such connections in the new countries, perhaps
particularly in East Africa, where suspicion of people of South Asian origin has a
long and troubled political history. That senior managers are predominantly from
Bangladesh as well as male, while field staff and junior managers are often local
women, created some initial suspicion, as well as an additional axis of difference
between management and field staff.
In Sierra Leone, where the Bangladeshi peace-keeping mission has enjoyed great
popularity, being Bangladeshi has positive popular associations. But elsewhere, it
is not clear that – or how – being Bangladeshi (implicitly, instead of white) has
shaped relationships on the ground. There are parallels here with Chinese
engagement in Africa, as some within BRAC International management noted. It
remains to be seen how this ‘non-whiteness’ figures politically:
Beyond this manipulated politics there are complex racial and cultural
discourses of whether the Chinese are treated as different and ‘other’ by
Africans or are somehow the same insofar as they are ‘not white’... Whether
and how this shared ‘non-whiteness’ and its linkages to the anti-imperialist
agenda of the political leaders plays out is another issue for ongoing analysis.
(Power and Mohan 2008: 34)
3.2 The end of alternatives? New ideologies of action

With the caveat that much remains to be seen, BRAC’s global expansion
challenges expectation in a context of gloom about NGOs and the ‘alternatives’
they were once believed to promise (see Bebbington et al. 2007; Lewis and
Opoku-Mensah 2006; Lewis and Kanji 2009). There are two distinct strands to the
‘disappointment’ theme. The first is declining interest in NGOs (and civil society
more generally) among aid donors, partly brought about by a stronger focus on
the state resulting from good governance, security, and aid coordination agendas
29 BRAC’s security problems in Afghanistan appear to have related more to ordinary criminality rather
than to political objectives, perhaps because as was seen in the opening paragraph, Bangladeshi
hostages are likely to carry less weight than European or North American ones.
34
(Lewis and Opoku-Mensah 2006; Howell et al. 2006). The second is

disappointment with the apparent failure of NGOs to engage in radical
transformative action to deliver positive social change (Bebbington et al. 2008;
Tvedt 2002, 2006). This includes an increasing homogeneity of language and
approach across NGOs, signalling a decline in local innovation and ownership of
the agenda (Mawdsley et al. 2002). The role of NGOs in supporting neoliberalist
economic agendas, particularly through service delivery activities believed to
undermine political accountability between states and citizens, is an important
element to this discussion (Tvedt 2002, 2006).
Against this backdrop, BRAC’s ambition contrasts with the strong sense that far
from being ‘magic bullets’, NGOs have ‘hit a wall’ (Bebbington et al. 2008, in the
introduction to the latest of the Manchester NGO Conference books).
Nevertheless, BRAC International does appear to have run up against the new
coldness of aid donors towards NGOs. And while there may be a global sharing of
development discourse, this has served BRAC only partially; the way matters
have been viewed in Bangladesh is (inevitably) not how they are viewed in
Uganda or Tanzania. The differences have been material, for BRAC’s capacity to
attract relatively low transaction cost, large-scale bilateral grant financing. In other
words, national context continues to matter greatly, despite the structuring power
of the international aid system. As Tvedt puts it, these are ‘internationalised
national traditions and... nationalised international institutions and ideas’ (Tvedt
2006: 685): the globalisation of aid discourses and practices only goes so far in
penetrating national institutions, and international institutions and practices are
effectively domesticated in the countries in which they operate.
BRAC is certainly different from other big international NGOs, but it does not
represent an ‘alternative’ in the tradition of radical, transformative struggles
against structures of power that impoverish and oppress. BRAC does envisage a
long-term engagement in the countries in which it works, seeing its role as in
‘development’, or deep processes of social, political and economic change, and
not as the narrower ‘Development’ of aid interventions (Bebbington et al. 2008).
This sense of engaging with long-term processes may help to explain why the
challenges BRAC International currently faces are cast as teething problems; the
perspective is not one of successful projects, but one of building frontline
organisations that can deliver services. This long-term engagement in service
delivery means that questions of political accountability will inevitably arise. While
there are reasons to believe that in Bangladesh, at least, the impact of BRAC
services has not been to undermine accountability, the new contexts mean the
question merits revisiting (see Lewis and Kanji 2009 for an up-to-date review of
the debates about NGO service delivery).
In its adaptive strategy, BRAC has begun to position itself as ‘social enterprise’, as
distinct from an ‘NGO’ (although the term is not being abandoned). This reposi-
tioning is most noticeable within the activities and language of BRAC USA, whose
President has a background in social entrepreneurship. This adaptation to a new,
largely US-based sociopolitical ideology about development may be the result of
several pressures: (a) the general criticism of and cooling off towards ‘NGOs’;30
(b) the sense within Bangladesh that ‘NGO’ does not encapsulate what Grameen
Bank, BRAC and others are doing: the idea of ‘social business’ has already been
35
taken to a global stage by the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Professor

Yunus; and (c) the need to generate interest and attract foundation grant and
commercial loan funding from within the US.
This repositioning as social enterprise is involving a considerable amount of

communications work; arguably for the first time, a BRAC entity is taking on public
relations in a serious way. BRAC USA plans to draw on its prominent supporters
to raise awareness about BRAC’s work around the world. One idea is for the
Buffetts (who are supporters through the Buffett Foundation) to send a copy of Ian
Smillie’s book Freedom From Want to 100 influential people, to include the US
President and celebrities. With respect to the question of ‘alternatives’ it is worth
noting that while the idea of ‘social enterprise’ involves an ideological shift to the
right from the perspective of a radical NGO social mobilisation agenda, within the
US it is a more progressive notion emerging out of the non-profit world, which
explicitly aims to build solidarity between the global South and the North.
3.3 The aid regime

It seems likely that BRAC’s Southernness has also affected its capacity to
mobilise aid in the new countries. That BRAC’s reputation and brand have not
preceded it into the aid circles of the new countries is a matter of some surprise
and disappointment for BRAC management; it highlights, too, the incomplete
nature of the ‘transnationality’ of aid to NGOs in development (Mawdsley et al.
2002). The Deputy Executive Director with responsibility for African programmes
felt that they were often an unknown quantity, and that within aid agencies,
knowledge of BRAC in Bangladesh and Afghanistan had not spread. Many aid
donors in the new countries, he said ‘seem to think we are stupid... or arrogant’,31
unaccustomed to requests for amounts like US$50 million, for what they view as
the untested programme of an unknown NGO. While no specific instance could be
given, the overall low profile of BRAC as an international actor is likely to reflect
its Southern origins. This low international profile seems to be part of the reason
for the current branding exercise: the Dhaka Head Office has recently recruited a
brand manager, and Nike provided some branding support in 2007 (BRAC 2009).
Bilateral aid to service-delivery NGO programmes appears to be less easily

available to BRAC outside of Bangladesh than their domestic experience had led
them to believe might be the case. Funds have been raised: in 2008, BRAC
International (excluding BRAC Bangladesh) had a budget of US$57.8 million, and
the budget for 2009 was US$118 million. But BRAC’s plans for expansion mean it
could absorb more. The transaction costs of working with smaller donors, from
whom much recent BRAC International funding has come, can be high, at a time
30 We are grateful to David Lewis for pointing this out.
31 Interview with Imran Matin. Imran did not think that the fact of their nationality was an important factor
in these discussions. But whereas for Sarah White, her ‘whiteness opened me doors, jumped me
queues, filled me plates, and invited me to speak’ (2002: 408), it seems likely that the fact that BRAC
staff are Bangladeshi means that such doors do not so easily open. Certainly race merits
consideration as a possible aspect of the BRAC experience with the aid regime.
36
when senior managers are occupied with teething problems on the ground. Aid to
service-delivery NGOs in Bangladesh has probably been more significant than in
other countries, other than those in post-conflict conditions, so that BRAC’s
expectations of bilateral aid may never have been realistic. The Paris Agenda,
particularly the move towards sectoral approaches, and the emphasis on NGOs
as civil society actors rather than service delivery agents (which has been
relatively muted in Bangladesh) have contributed to these challenges.
While BRAC’s profile has proven to be surprisingly low among aid donors in the
new countries, central political figures and government actors in the new countries
appear to have more knowledge of and interest in BRAC programmes than had
been anticipated. There have been some high-level government visits to BRAC
Bangladesh from powerful people in a number of the new countries, as well as
from the Gandhi dynasty. Despite this interest, the strategic focus has remained
on concentrating efforts and personnel on the ground, rather than on (as one
possible element of an expansionary strategy) cultivating a supportive
constituency at the centre.
There is a sense that BRAC can gain entry into contexts in which other inter-
national NGOs, perhaps with prominent concerns about human rights, may not
wish or be invited to enter: Sri Lanka is one such example. Not seeking direct
political influence at the centre, neither being so constrained by security concerns,
BRAC may find it easier to work in some of these sensitive political environments.
Here again, there are parallels with Chinese engagement, with its ‘older rhetoric of
third world solidarity’ and its Africa Policy ‘premised on respect for sovereignty and
“non-interference” in national political processes’ (Power and Mohan 2008: 34).
The Southernness of BRAC International is relevant to thinking about power

relations among NGOs, as international NGOs (possibly increasingly) behave as
brokers of aid for smaller Southern NGOs. To date, the ‘international NGO’ has
referred to large Northern-based organisations (McIlwaine 2007); these have
enjoyed good access to official aid flows, particularly bilaterally, which is
channelled to ‘partner’ local NGOs in developing countries. Some within the NGO
world, both Southern and Northern, see this relationship as entailing that
international NGOs increasingly behave like bilateral aid donors (Bebbington et al.
2008: 17). While the BRAC expansion model does not rely on such partnerships,
it does set up new hierarchical relationships between culturally and racially distinct
sets of actors.
4 Conclusions: graduation or
metamorphosis? From NGO to
social enterprise
This paper set out as a preliminary exploration of BRAC’s global expansion. It
quite possibly raises more questions than it answers. The big question remains
unanswered: does BRAC International buck a trend of NGOs ‘hitting a wall’? Is
BRAC an ‘alternative’ development approach? Or merely the hand-maiden to
37
neoliberal development policy? BRAC is certainly not what we have become used
to hoping an NGO might be. It now presents itself more as a hybrid form of social
enterprise than as a social movement. But the enterprise is ultimately social
mission critical: in its own terms, it does not matter how fast it grows or attains
financial sustainability if it fails to demonstrate measurable, significant positive
changes for poor people.
If we think of organisations like BRAC engaged in a competitive market for service

delivery within Tvedt’s DOSTANGO (donor-state-NGO) system, its expansion
makes more sense. BRAC’s social mission is layered on a platform of economic
development and service delivery, at the frontline quite literally anchored within
the infrastructure of microfinance. This is what makes it economical to reach so
many with social services. Its ambitions of scale are another feature of BRAC’s
distinctiveness: the core BRAC philosophy is that is just not enough to do
something useful on a small scale. And because it is necessary to be big, it
becomes necessary to be businesslike in the service delivery market. One
challenge for BRAC’s expansion is that while concerns about the impact of NGO
service delivery on public accountability have to some extent been allayed or
neutralised in Bangladesh, the situation is different elsewhere. Very recently,
BRAC’s response has included a perceptible shift towards the language of
‘rights-based approaches, with a focus on “enforceable rights” of access to
resources’ (BRAC 2009: 12–13).
Whether BRAC is merely different, rather than ‘alternative’, and the challenges it
faces in carving out a space and securing financing for its expansion are issues
rooted in its distinctive Southernness. The paper makes an initial survey of the
ways in which BRAC’s Southern origins seems to have shaped its global
adventure. For reasons of focus and the lack of evidence, it unfortunately leaves
untouched issues of frontline relations among Bangladeshi and national staff, the
communities in which they work, and the local political and civil society context in
which they operate; these will have to be the focus of future research. The paper
does begin to sketch ways in which BRAC’s distinctive Southernness introduces
new dimensions to aid relationships; but the importance of this difference, and the
advantages it may bring, are at times overshadowed by the material impacts of
the aid regime. As BRAC reshapes itself to enter new non-profit markets as social
enterprise, it is partly repositioning itself to frame its Southernness as a core
advantage. If, as has been suggested by this review, BRAC International
represents a trend towards South-South exchanges within development
cooperation, it will continue to be of interest to see how this newest animal in the
aid jungle fares.
38
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IDS WORKING PAPER 339

IDS WORKING PAPER 339

Thinking Big, Going Global:

Naomi Hossain and Anasuya Sengupta

Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9RE UK

Thinking Big, Going Global: The Challenge of BRAC’s Global Expansion

Typeset by IDS, Brighton UK. Printed by Nexus, Brighton, UK.

Thinking Big, Going Global: The Challenge of BRAC’s

Naomi Hossain and Anasuya Sengupta

Keywords: NGOs; international NGOs; Microfinance; Bangladesh; relationships

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social

Anasuya Sengupta is currently a Research Assistant at the Institute of

ALREP Alternative Livelihood Rural Finance Programme

BEOC Basic Education for Older Children

BPHS Basic Package of Health Services

BRAC Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee

BRAC-RED BRAC-Research and Evaluation Division

CBDRR Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction

CFPR Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction

CGAP Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest

CHP Community Health Promoter

CHVs Community Health Volunteers

DevPro Development Professionals Program

EHC Essential Health Care

ELA Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents

FIDELIS Fund for Innovative DOTS Expansion through Local Initiatives

FFTIG Food for Training and Income Generation

FINCA Foundation for International Community Assistance

HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired Immune Deficiency

IDP Internally Displaced Persons

ISDP Infrastructure and Social Development Programme

MISFA Microfinance Support Facility for Afghanistan

MFIs microfinance institutions

MoPH Ministry of Public Health

MoU memorandum of understanding

MRRD Ministry of Rehabilitation and Development

NFPE Non-formal Primary Education

NGO non-governmental organisation

NSP National Solidarity Programme

NWFP North-West Frontier Province

PDR Participation and Development Relations

SME small and medium enterprise

WATSAN Water Supply and Sanitation

WFP World Food Programme

The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of BRAC’s global expansion, a

1.2 Approach, positionality and limitations

Transnationality is certainly relevant to the BRAC story, particularly if, as seems to

To tackle this question it is necessary to revisit, briefly, the question of BRAC’s

Third, as exploratory research, no primary field research in BRAC International

l Purposive interviews with BRAC Bangladesh and BRAC International

l Firsthand experience and observation of BRAC programmes in Bangladesh

l Organisational material (annual reports, website material, research and

l Other secondary literature, including blogs from visitors to the BRAC

2 Going global: the birth of an

5 Interview with Susan Davis, 24 June 2009.

2.1 BRAC in growth mode: motives and critics

6 Interview with F.H. Abed and Sandra Kabir, 25 June 2009.