The empowerment of NGOs: Looking at BRAC in Bangladesh for Geography 141

My final paper for Geography 141 (Uneven Development Geographies: Prosperity and Impoverishment in Third World) gave students great flexibility with their topic choice. This offered me the chance to build on something I had looked at briefly in last year’s GEOG2014 class at UCL. Using the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) as an example, I chose to examine how NGOs in Bangladesh have gained considerable power at the expense of government in the past few decades.

My findings suggested that NGOs like BRAC are taking power from government through both local and global forces.

Locally, BRAC has become empowered through its relationship with Bangladeshi people. This has occurred due to its involvement in healthcare, education and other service-based programmes. As a result many people have become directly involved with the NGO. It now has over 3 million members from over 15,000 villages (Newnham 2000). This extensive relationship with Bangladeshi people has given BRAC a far greater public image than state agencies, prescribing them more power over local political and social issues.

Globally NGOs such as BRAC have achieved increased power through two main streams. The first of these is the ‘new policy agenda'. Dictated by the doctrines of the Washington Consensus, this encourages a withdrawal of the state and a consequent increase in power and autonomy held by NGOs and private enterprises. The second is the increased support BRAC and other NGOs receive from development agencies and donors who see them as a more effective form of development and democratisation than governments.

The impacts of this empowerment on development have been felt on a local and global scale. Locally it allows NGOs such as BRAC to expand their operations and to act under their own terms. This has allowed BRAC to efficiently train over 130,000 farmers to use modern agricultural techniques, provide over 12,000 people with legal and human rights information, and to establish over 300 new schools across the country (BRAC 2015: 12-15). Globally, increased power and autonomy has allowed BRAC to expand its development agenda to other countries including Sri Lanka, Haiti and Afghanistan. BRAC’s empowerment and a greater global image has also led to it being used as a template by other NGOs around the world with similar aims.

This was a great opportunity to independently research something that has always interested me. It has also challenged my views of both NGOs and the development industry as a whole.

References

BRAC (2015) ‘BRAC Annual Report’ (WWW), BRAC (http://brac.net/sites/default/files/ar2014/BRAC-annual-report-14.pdf, 29 February 2016).

Newnham, J. (2000) ‘The BRAC Poultry Programme in Bangladesh: A Performance Measurement Framework.’ Paper presented at the International Conference on Business Services for Small Enterprises in Asia, 3-6 April, Hanoi.

Geography 141 - Not letting go of the 'third world'

A key reason I was interested in taking this class (Geography 141 - Uneven Development Geographies: Prosperity and Impoverishment in Third World) was to explore the differences in how Geography and development are taught differently at my home an host institutions.

Without having even started the class an immediate difference has already caught my attention: the use of the term ‘third world’ in the class’ title. At UCL students are taught not to use the term as it inaccurately portrays parts of the world as a standard for which ‘development’ should be measured against. However ‘third world’ is casually thrown around throughout the Geography 141 syllabus. This is hardly surprising considering the US was an early ‘exemplar’ for development, with President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address spurring the rhetoric that the ‘first world’ was dutifully bound to develop the ‘third’ (Donovan 1982).

With the Cold War over, terms used to describe ‘first world’ allies, ‘second world’ enemies and ‘third world’ non-aligned countries to the US should have been made obsolete (Gaddis 1998). In fact even their successors, ‘developed’ and ‘un-’ or ‘underdeveloped’, have been hugely criticised by post-development theorists. Such thinkers argue that these terms are equally problematic for merely reinforcing Western and Northern hegemonies, therefore allowing such countries to create development discourses (Sachs, 1998).

Mapping of the 'three worlds' during the Cold War 

It will be interesting throughout this class to see if the term is challenged, or whether universities in the US choose to hold on to Cold War imaginaries and terms which maintain the nation's status as a global superpower in the field of development.

References

Donovan, R. (1982) Tumultuous years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, New York: Norton.

Gaddis, J. (1998) We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford: Oxford University.

Sachs, W. (1998) The Development Dictionary, London: Zed Books.

Winter Quarter Classes

With the mercury gently dropping below 14°C here in Southern California, we enter the winter quarter. As outlined in an earlier post, my rationale for choosing classes while abroad is to explore new fields that I hope will add further breadth and depth to my Geography degree. My choices for the second term are as follows:

Geography 141 - Uneven Development Geographies: Prosperity and Impoverishment in Third World
The purpose of this class is to explore how and why development initiatives across the world have resulted in such a wide variety of outcomes. While I have previously studied development at UCL (GEOG2014), this focussed more on explaining different forms of development, the actors involved and the main theories opposing it. These theories included post-colonialism, post-development, and even critiques of post-development (Escobar 1995; Kothari 2005; Matthews 2004). UCLA’s Geography 141 class focusses more on how livelihoods have been affected by development. I am not only interested in this class for the opportunity to study development from a different perspective. It will also be a great chance to further explore how a topic, and by proxy Geography, is taught differently at my home and host institutions.

Assessment: 10% attendance and participation, 30% mid-term exam, 30% research paper, 30% final exam.

History M155 - History of Los Angeles
As a geographer, Los Angeles is not only a fantastic place to study geography, but also an extraordinarily interesting place to study the geography of. Considered to be the ‘archetypal postmodern city’, urban geography takes a particular interest in Los Angeles (Sardar 1998: 149). History M155 is an excellent opportunity to study how the city came to hold such a glorious moniker. The class examines how forces such as race, culture, gender, class and sexuality came to shape Los Angeles’ history dating back to the colonisation of California by the Spanish in the 1540s.

Assessment: 33.3% mid-term exam, 33.3% paper, 33.3% final exam.

Earth, Planetary, And Space Sciences 9 - Solar System and Planets
Again following Bonnett's (2008) definition of Geography being routed in exploration both in the traditional and non-traditional sense, I have chosen to take a class that looks beyond Earth and at its surroundings. While not directly connected to the human or physical geographies that I have studied in the past, this class will provide a helpful insight into the environment (or lack there of) that Earth occupies. With an exploration of our solar system, galaxy and universe, the scale of Earth and its geographies can be fully put into context.

Assessment: 10% project, 30% labs, 20% in-class exams, 40% final exam.

References

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is Geography?, Los Angeles: Sage.

Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development, Princeton: Princeton University.

Kothari, U. ( 2005) ‘From Colonial Administration to Development Studies: a Post-colonial Critique of the History of Development Studies’, in Kothari (ed.) A Radical History of Development Studies, London: Zed Books, 47-66.

Matthews, S. (2004) ‘Post-development theory and the question of alternatives: a view from Africa’, Third World Quarterly, 25, 2, 373-384.

Sardar, Z. (1998) Postmodernism and the Other, London: Pluto Press.