Freedom From Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organization That's Winning the Fight Against Poverty

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:17:00 +0000

The truism tells us that if you give a woman a fish, she’ll eat for a day, but if you teach her to fish, she’ll eat for a lifetime. This philosophy undergirds the work of Building Resources Across Communities (BRAC), an international NGO located in Bangladesh. The group began in 1972 as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, but quickly outgrew the moniker. When staff realized this, they abandoned the name and began to popularize what Canadian academic and NGO expert Ian Smillie calls “a motto: Building Resources Across Communities.”

By all accounts, BRAC’s achievements are stunning. First, the fiscal: In 1980, BRAC’s $780,000 annual budget was entirely donor-generated. A quarter century later, in 2006, the budget skyrocketed to $495 million with eighty percent raised through microfinance and other community-controlled enterprises. Chicken rearing, cattle breeding, fruit and vegetable farming, silkworm production, and craft workshops form the crux of their work. BRAC also sponsors health centers, financial institutions, and literacy programs, and has created a world-class university for people who might otherwise not have a shot at higher education. Their endeavors are continually expanding and have moved beyond Bangladesh’ borders into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda, and the southern Sudan.

It’s an exciting story—or should be. Unfortunately, Smillie’s account is as dry as burnt bread. Part of the problem is stylistic. Too few BRAC staffers are interviewed and the voices of BRAC’s beneficiaries are also largely absent.

What’s more, Smillie dances around the most difficult issues, mentioning but never exploring them. He writes of Muslim fundamentalists who object to BRAC’s work with women, but Smillie never tells us how the group deals with such conflicts. Questions about a more general backlash also come to the fore. Since BRAC’s goal is to end poverty, not simply to dull its most dastardly edges, one can’t help but wonder about the reaction of large landowners and the business elite to BRAC’s anti-penury campaigns. Smillie’s account sidesteps politics and class conflicts altogether, making them so vague that they seem irrelevant. And the central conflict over power—who has it and how they can be forced to cede some of it to marginalized groups—gets nary a mention.

This leaves readers with more questions than answers. I was particularly interested in learning whether BRAC believes revolutionary shifts can be achieved through the types of nonviolent community organizing the group champions. Mention of left-wing theorists Paulo Freire and Karl Marx not withstanding, strategies for long-term change are, for the most, part missing from Freedom from Want.

Smillie presents BRAC as highly effective in helping select individuals lift themselves out of poverty. Even if this were completely accurate, the 2008 World Bank estimate of 1.4 billion people worldwide living on less than $1.25 day—including one quarter of those residing in the so-called developing world—suggests that there are limits to NGO activity. Without a global commitment to ending prevalent economic and social disparities—that is, massive social reorganization—NGOs can do little to change the world order.

In the end, the truth is clear: despite significant victories by BRAC and groups like it, the challenge of winning universal social justice requires more than one organization, no matter how stellar.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, June 2nd 2009

Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:30:00 +0000

By Susan Dewey

Kumarian Press

In Hollow Bodies, Susan Dewey travels to Armenia, Bosnia, and India to look at the institutional responses to sex trafficking in the three different cultural and governmental contexts. Armenia is plagued by poverty, unemployment and a poor quality of life that encourages migration. Bosnia is recovering from a violent war in which many women were victims of rape and forced into prostitution. However, unlike Armenia, its close proximity to Western Europe brings large amounts of donor aid and pressure to integrate with the West. Further east lies India, which receives little Western aid for trafficking issues. Therefore, its purpose in the book is to serve as an example of what can be done at a local level.

Dewey demonstrates her passion for the issue by telling her audience how her great-grandmother and grandmother survived the Depression by becoming prostitutes. This personal connection is felt throughout the text. Dewey’s greatest strength as a writer is her ability to bring the three different countries to life. In doing so, she notices the details of the landscape, the social structure of the setting and even utilizes private conversations to provide a useful context for the environment the women are operating within.

Her research mainly comes from her time as a volunteer consultant with the International Organization for Migration. Through her work with this multi-lateral association as well as through interviews with various policymakers, prostitutes and NGO leaders, she gives voice to the people involved in trying to reduce trafficking.

Dewey notes that institutions can fail to serve victims of trafficking. She is quick to criticize what bureaucrats, agencies and developmental programs do wrong, though she’s reluctant to point out what statistics she’s using to back up her claims. For instance, in the successful intervention she cites in India, she doesn’t provide impact or evaluation data, which leaves claims of effectiveness to be based solely upon subjective assessments.

Dewey admits approaching her research with a bias favoring prostitutes. Her emotional connection colors her discussions with bureaucrats and her critiques of their work loses force when she fails to address the policy aspects of trafficking or to suggest concrete changes that she thinks would improve upon current practices. Dewey’s suggestion that readers write to lawmakers to “refuse to support temporary U.S. funding initiatives that do not consider local needs and operate on a short-term basis that renders them unable to effect real or sustainable change” is insufficiently concrete. Why should US funding be permanent and how can this be achieved given the needs for benchmarks of effectiveness and our own political term limits? What type of local input should be collected and how? What is real and sustainable change? What specific goals should taxpayer dollars aim to achieve?

One of Dewey’s main criticisms is that programs fail to take into account the views of trafficking victims. Given that, the book could have benefited from more in-depth interviews of prostitutes in the three countries so that readers could gain a better understanding of what type of assistance these women would value and why.

Dewey appropriately highlights some of the failures of international institutions. She also presents a refreshingly honest portrait of the practical, ethical and personal difficulties a researcher can face. What is lacking is a more detailed picture of the women needing help and ideas of what specifically should be done to improve services to assist them.

Written by: Jessica Jacobson, May 7th 2009