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.