Dignity and Results in the Dhaka Slums
The following guest post is from James Torrey, board member of BRAC USA. Battery Powered is proud to have supported BRAC’s groundbreaking work as part of our Extreme Poverty theme.
Six women sit together on a woven mat at the end of a dead-end alley in a Dhaka slum, their backs against a wall of corrugated metal. They’re waiting to greet me. Walking down this narrow street in an area of the Bangladeshi capital called Mohammadpur, I’d felt uncomfortable for the first time since my arrival in the country. It’s not that people looked hostile in any way. But it did seem like that people were looking at me quizzically, as if to say, “Why are you here?”
The answer is to visit participants in an incredible, groundbreaking program run by BRAC—more on this organization in a moment—that focuses on extreme poverty in urban settings. This program received a two-year grant of $250,000 from Battery Powered last year to reach 450 women in slums like these. The program is designed to “graduate” women in these slums from the trap of extreme poverty onto a path toward greater prosperity. It does so by training the poorest women in new livelihoods, giving a one-time grant of productive assets (like goats, a cow, or goods for small trade), supporting them with a monthly stipend for two years while they learn their new trade. During this time, BRAC staff coaches them intensively in matters of health, savings, basic financial management, and self-confidence.
The program has had amazing success. In rural and urban settings in multiple countries, more than 1.6 million women have participated in BRAC and BRAC-style ultra-poor graduation programs. The graduation rate in Bangladesh is an eye-popping 95 percent.
Others have adapted the same methodology around the world, leading The Economist to suggest it might even represent “a universal method to help the very poor.” The Guardian recently asked if BRAC had “found a way to banish extreme poverty.”
I’m here to see for myself.
Urban migrants find their way
The poverty seems even more grinding in Mohammadpur than in other parts of the capital, but very quickly, the women’s cordiality and openness put me at ease. A resident named Monoara does most of the talking at first.
“I’m from Barisal,” she says, naming a coastal area in the south of Bangladesh. “I came to Dhaka for the first time with my parents after the floods of 1988. I got married to a man from Barisal and went home, but it was a very bad relationship—he married another woman without my permission—and there were no opportunities for income in Barisal. When I came back to Dhaka, I would work as a maid in homes in Dhanmondi”—one of the middle-class residential areas of the capital—“but the work was very undignified.”
Things took a turn for the worse when she was evicted from her home. She ended up here in the Mohammadpur slum. She learned she was eligible for business training classes when a branch manager for BRAC visited. “The most important thing I learned was how to bargain with sellers and wholesalers,” she says.
Monoara now works for herself as a tea-seller at the nearby ferry port, earning about 2000 taka (about $25) a week. (This, I’m told, represents a healthy income in this area.) She lives alone here in the slum.
“I had a son,” she continues. “Two years ago, he died in an accident.” He died shortly after being admitted to Dhaka Medical College, she says. She takes out a set of laminated photos of her son. It’s clear she remains devastated by the loss—who wouldn’t be?—but she’s looking to the future regardless.
“My plan is to return to Barisal and run grocery shop,” she says. “I’ve already paid 30,000 taka ($378) for some land there and still need to save 70,000.”
The other women begin speaking up. They tell me how hard it is to find your way as a rural migrant in Dhaka, one of the world’s fastest growing cities.
“Having a network is important for a city dweller,” says Parveen, who migrated to Dhaka 15 years ago from Madaripur, an area to the south. “Newcomers don’t have that, so job opportunities are very limited, and they can’t borrow money.”
“When they have no food, we try to give them food, and connect them with other people to find jobs,” says Banu, from Bagerhat, another coastal area on the Bay of Bengal.
An introduction to BRAC
Two days earlier, I’d had my first real introduction to the work of BRAC, which has to be the most fascinating organization I’ve ever come across.
Based here in Bangladesh and active in 11 countries, BRAC is the largest—and many say the most effective—nongovernmental organization in the world, with large-scale initiatives in education, healthcare, microfinance, girls’ empowerment, agriculture, and human and legal rights. It also runs socially responsible businesses, a bank, a university, and the world’s largest mobile money platform. The scale of its work is astounding.
BRAC’s global headquarters in Dhaka, the teeming, smog-choked capital of Bangladesh, overlooks a slum called Korail. On my first visit to BRAC programs, I’d been pulled across a lagoon to Korail with a long canoe pole in a shaky flat-bottomed skiff to a row of tin shacks.
I disembarked to walk through a crowded maze of dirt pathways between storefronts. Side alleys, so narrow that one has to walk single file to get through them, led to “private” residences. Waste water trickled down both sides of the passageways.
Life here is not, on the surface, like anything I am used to. But once in Korail, I see no signs of despondency or despair. People go about their business, haggling for goods and watching soap operas on shop TVs.
I visit one of BRAC’s maternity centers, which is just three clean rooms adjacent to an alley. Pregnant women are taking classes, with a woman holding up a flip chart illustrating what to expect during pregnancy.
The women will likely have their babies right here. I learn that before BRAC opened these delivery centers, about 85 percent of all births in the area took place at home, with no trained medical personnel present. A BRAC staffer told me the rate in this part of the slum has basically fallen to zero; maternal mortality has been cut by about a third.
This is modern Bangladesh, a country where the poverty is still grinding, but where a sense of transformation is palpable once you dig beneath the surface.
A relentless focus on results
Before leaving, I had the privilege of meeting Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the former accountant who founded BRAC in 1972—and, decades later, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his services to humanity. I was impressed enough with his work that I later joined the board of its US affiliate, BRAC USA.
The most remarkable thing about Abed and BRAC is the relentless focus on results. Despite seemingly daunting circumstances, it’s baked into the organization’s culture never to give up. Over decades, for instance, it helped lower Bangladesh’s fertility rate, through family planning services and a child survival campaign, from nearly 7 children per women to just 2.2 on average. Instead of having huge families, women now enter the workforce and earn enough to send their girls to school.
The average Bangladeshi girl did not complete school a generation ago. Now there are more girls in school than boys. Remarkable.
Today, BRAC is tackling perhaps the greatest challenge of all—the eradication of extreme poverty from the face of the earth. Having met women of such grit and determination as the ones I encountered in Dhaka, I’m more confident than ever that this can happen.
When I think back to my journey to Bangladesh, I no longer think of poverty. I am reminded of all the things that are possible in this world of ours—and I see hope outshining despair.
James Torrey is a board member of BRAC USA.