TIME magazine posted an article online titled, “3 Key Lessons to Starting a Successful NGO, According to an Effective Poverty Fighter.” The article reads in part as follows;
“A cyclone in 1970 that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh changed the course of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed’s life and the lives of the 140 million his anti-poverty organization has since reached.
At the time of the disaster, he saw bodies of men, women, and children floating in the shallow waters of a bay.
‘That shocked me’, he said at the Fortune – Time Global Forum in Rome on Friday. ‘Suddenly, I thought the life I was leading had no meaning at all. I was so disconnected from the poor like this’.
The revelation prompted Abed to leave his job at Shell Oil and eventually start BRAC, now the largest non-governmental organization on the planet with over 110,000 employees and an institution that’s considered the world’s most effective at eradicating poverty.
BRAC started as a relief operation called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in 1972 to help the nation recover from the cyclone and its war of independence from Pakistan. It soon morphed into a larger effort to eliminate poverty and empower women through social and economic channels. Today, it has commercial enterprises like a printing press, retail outlets, and the private BRAC University that help fund its development programs. Last year, Abed won the 2015 World Food prize for his “unparalleled” work on reducing poverty in Bangladesh and 10 other nations.”
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