Being one of the developing countries, Bangladesh has faced multitude of problems since its inception. Despite of both natural and man-made problems, the 75 million people at independence that turned into 161 million in 2011 have managed it survive on a land mass and with resources that would have been depleted overnight almost by any other people. The need for development that emerged with independence, and the willingness of outsiders to help Bangladesh generated a community of development organizations, that is, non-government organizations (NGO) unparallel elsewhere. Bangladesh has become renowned for the effectiveness of its development community as well as for its quantitative and qualitative efforts to alleviate poverty. The paper explains the mechanism of NGOs, with reference to BRAC, that contributes to the poverty reduction effort in Bangladesh.
BRAC:
BRAC has started its journey in 1972 with twin objective of poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor. Although it has started out as a limited relied operation in 1972 in a remote village of Bangladesh, now it is one of the largest NGOs around the world. Organizing the poor using communities’ own human and material resources, it catalyses lasting change, creating an ecosystem in which the poor have the chance to seize control of their own lives. Over the years since inception BRAC has gone through a series of evolutions and is now one of the larger NGOs in the country.
History of BRAC: BRAC has started its journey in 1972 just after the liberation by helping the refugees returning home from India to Shalla (a remote and inaccessible village at the northeastern boarder of the country). Later BRAC realized that activities of this sort could serve only as a stopgap measures meeting the immediate need of the people. Thus, BRAC launched a program to meet long term need of people in 1973 with integrated community development approach in 200 villages in the same area including Shalla. The program offered a large array of services including agriculture, horticulture, fisheries, adult education, health care, family planning, and vocational training.
The approach was focused on two sets of objectives. First one was to change the passive attitude of the rural people through education, training and unite them to work cooperatively. The second one was to extend the essential services and demonstrate their use in order to motivate other people to take the advantage of those services. However the step did not turn out to be a success as villagers were not motivated to show the expected outcome. BRAC then reorganized and mobilized the poor into village organizations (VO).
Major Programs of BRAC:
BRAC strives to achieve its goal of alleviate poverty and empower poor through a number of programs. The programs are described briefly as follows:
Human Development Program: To promote some core human development programs BRAC provides services such as group based micro-credit, essential health care and human development training for members. All VO members have to participate in this package to have an access to other packages, namely agriculture, poultry, live-stock, sericulture, fisheries, social forestry, and rural enterprises. The entire package is termed as Rural Development Program (RDP). Presently RDP is operating in 60% of the villages by covering about 3million households. Previously these programs were fully dependant on donor fund but after the year 2000, these programs no longer need donor support.
Health Program
Health program received a major thrust in 1980 with the introduction of nation- wide program on Oral Therapy Extension Program (OTEP) to cure diarrhea and cholera. BRAC also started a program focusing on women’s reproductive health, family planning and nutrition. Now it offers about 3 million rural people of the country.
Children’s Educational Program
BRAC offers a non-formal primary education (NFPE) program since 1985 with 22 schools which has increased to 34 thousands schools. The program mainly promotes female education (70% girls) and enrolls children from the poorer family.
Training Division
The goal of the Training Division is to improve the management capacities of the development practitioners particularly both within and outside BRAC, and to enhance the human and operational skill of the group members and program participants.
Income Generating Project:
AARONG. BRAC Dairy. Printers are some income generating projects of BRAC. BRAC Printer was initiated to supply the education material at lower cost and to generate additional income. AARONG can be seen as a very profitable project for BRAC. But this income is transferred to other development programs to lower the donor fund dependency.

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