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With NGO 'middle-name'. . . bid for world leadership in humanitarian and profit-seeking social organisations

Third article in a series dedicated to Bangladesh's liberation month in 1971


Imtiaz A. Hussain | December 11, 2018 00:00:00


As home of one of the world's largest non-governmental organisation (NGO) in BRAC (an institution with an evolving nomenclature that is explained below), Bangladesh may also be the country that gave the NGO label a meaningful face. Clearly Bangladesh's 1971 liberation war mobilised a vast array of civic consciousness worldwide, but how the snowball effects of the mammoth November 1970 cyclone that mauled this deltaic land, then the emaciating famine that followed our liberation in 1974, should not be ignored in appraising how or why the NGO label has justifiably become Bangladesh's middle-name.

Two NGO types demand attention: humanitarian and corporate. We might not have been able to have this discussion intelligently in the early 1970s, based on unfolding dynamics or observations. Only through a retrospective prism do they come across analytically clear enough to help produce replicable and meaningful remedies. Something more contributed to those remedies becoming successful. Each of the three above-mentioned landmarks in 1970, 1971, and 1973-4 were extreme cases of humanitarian plights (the devastating consequences of the cyclone; killings, rapes, and uprooting with the liberation war; as well as the tragedy of starving to death, literally in one's home, from famine, respectively), but together they constituted newborn Bangladesh's original middle-name: a 'basket-case'.

Yet, how Bangladesh rose from that helpless, hapless condition to raising NGO support levels (rather than demanding NGO attention, assistance, and resources), and reinventing this entity as a productive (as opposed to a preventive) instrument, is a narrative worth retelling: how the humanitarian NGO conversion into a corporate body matches the steady welfare increments, certainly in Bangladesh, but also globally. That does not at all mean the NGO label today is an exclusively demand-supply network, providing products and services while reaping profits, either to boost social responsibility tasks or simply reaping profits. That transformation is best captured in the constantly-changing BRAC nomenclature from the 1970s, with its original identity as a relief agency catering to desperate local needs transforming into exporting its humanitarian services and personnel, while also drastically diversifying priorities.

How its name kept changing, even while it still retained its trademark acronym, informs and enlightens us about Bangladesh's 47-year evolution. Founded right after the December 1971 victory, the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC) became Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee before rechristening itself Bangladesh Resources Across Communities. From targeting refugee return and rehabilitation in 1972, it quickly institutionalised, along with Mohammad Yunus's Grameen Bank, Bangladesh's second globally recognised trademark after 'basket-case': micro-financing, from about 1974. So much was its impact that the BRAC founder, Fazle Hasan Abed was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and Yunus, along with his Grameen Bank, won the first Nobel prize of any Bangladeshi.

Eventually NGO attention turned from microfinance (without microfinance disappearing) to education. Beginning in 1985 on a non-formal basis across the countryside, the BRAC enterprise accounted for over two-thirds of all Bangladeshi non-formal primary schools (with over 30,000 units of its own by the turn of the century). Its inevitable flagship university, built in Dhaka, interestingly dropped its rural epithet. It was ready, as too the country it represented, to explore global outlets or contributions, the former through microcredit, the latter, in conjunction with many other independent forces, the game-changing ready-made-garments (RMGs) industry. This became Bangladesh's third global trademark, all with BRAC fingerprints, at least of sorts.

Although the BRAC story has been highlighted, and mention has been made of its keen micro-credit competitor, Grameen Bank, both only represent the tip of a NGO iceberg that riddled the country after 1971. With the NGO number around 2,000 today, Sajjad Zohir made two important distinctions (in "Economic and Political Weekly," vol. 39, no. 36 in 2004, pp. 4109-13): (a) though the NGO presence in the 1970s was dominated by those originally outside Bangladesh, by the turn of the century, the pendulum had swung decisively in the reverse direction, to Bangladesh's very heartland, the countryside; and (b) a clear NGO bifurcation began, with micro-financing institutions (MFIs), like BRAC Bank and Grameen Bank, spearheading market-driven entrepreneurship among the poor, and a service-driven thrust accenting social activities, women empowerment, poverty-alleviation, and, more recently, climate-change mitigation efforts. It was also necessary to shift one foot into metropolitan confines, as a stepping stone towards external operations.

It is no secret why Bangladesh has one of the most open-door gender approach in any Muslim country: poverty-alleviation requires multiple family income-earners; being more conscious of financial security, mothers automatically become microfinance customers, the more so the less they can depend on a steady income; and through their meticulous manual skills, women serve as the perfect RMG employee, outshining even machines with their low-costs and intricate work-habits. True, there is a lot more that can be done for women, but one of the NGO success stories has been to boost female empowerment across the country. So much so has this been a salient social force that without women input, the economy, and thereby the country, could easily be jeopardised: RMG exports would collapse, and the entire micro-financial structure built over a generation would stand close to collapsing.

Since climate-change imperatives virtually depend on substantial NGO participation, the most stellar NGO contributions might actually lie ahead. As a ground-zero location in that defence-line, Bangladesh's NGO future can only shine brighter. Controlling Rohingya refugees dropped, as if from out of the blue in 2017, as a test-case of Bangladesh's ability to face whatever pressure the environment may impose in the future. The size and suddenness of the influxes were matched by NGO presence, quick-responses, and forthright attention to the immediate needs, from housing and feeding to sheltering and protecting. These helped thwart the widely-predicted catastrophes, particularly in the 2018 rainy season.

All of these were possible because of the institutionalised mobilisation spanning thirty-odd years. Our rural dwellers may be better prepared for some of the world's obvious calamities than their counterparts in many other countries because of their experiences with adversities. That is an enormous Bangladeshi NGO contribution. Whether the entity is local or foreign, it has played a critical role in building the country's civil society. Bangladesh's rise from the ashes, as it were, then the rise towards a middle-income future was made possible by its multifaceted and entrepreneurial NGO drive, from rehabilitation to relief, to education, then back to refugee or environmental controls.

Exporting this magic remains the logical but largely untapped frontier. Inroads here and there suggest how welcoming this may be: environmental, financial, and social deficits, threats, or challenges litter every community on earth, meaning there is a lot to be done, increasingly so. This is the right setting for the experienced Bangladeshi NGO fleet to bid for world leadership in humanitarian and profit-seeking social organisations.

Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.

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