Abed, Sir Fazle Hasan KCMG

Abed, Sir Fazle Hasan KCMG (1936-2019) founder of brac (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), one of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations.

Abed was born on 27 April 1936 in the village Baniachang of Habiganj district in Sylhet division. He belonged to a zamindar family and was one of eight children of Siddiq Hasan and Syeda Sufia Khatun.

After passing Intermediate from Dhaka College in 1954, Abed left home at the age of 18 to attend the University of Glasgow where he studied naval architecture. Seeing no prospect of a carrier in Naval Architecture in East Pakistan, he joined the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in London and completed his professional education in 1962.

Abed returned to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to join Shell Oil Company and quickly rose to head of its finance division. During his time at Shell, the devastating cyclone and tidal surge of 1970 hit the south and south-eastern coastal regions of the country, killing at least half a million people. The cyclone had massive impact on Abed’s mind. Together with friends, Abed created HELP, an organization that provided relief and rehabilitation to the people of the worst affected island of Manpura, which had lost three-quarters of its population in the disaster.

Abed was in the United Kingdom during the 1971 War of Liberation where he engaged himself in Action Committee along with others to lobby with the governments of Europe for Bangladesh’s independence.

Abed decided to use the funds he had generated from selling his apartment to initiate there an organization to deal with the long-term tasks of improving the living conditions of the rural poor. On his return, he selected the remote region of Sulla in northern Bangladesh to start his work, and this work led to the foundation of non-governmental organization, known as brac, in 1972.

Brac have become one of the largest development organizations in the World in terms of the scale and diversity of its interventions. The organization now operates in all 64 districts of Bangladesh and carries out development activities education, healthcare, microfinance, upskills, human rights, agriculture, and enterpreneurial development. In 2002, brac went international by taking its range of development interventions to Afghanistan. Since then, it has expanded its activities to a total of 10 countries across Africa, successfully adapting its unique integrated development model across varying geographic and socioeconomic contexts. It is now considered to be the largest non-profit organization in the world in terms of both employees and people served.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was a member of the Group of Eminent Persons appointed by the UN Secretary General in 2010 to advise on support for the least developed countries. In 2014 and 2017, he was named in Fortune Magazine’s List of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. As a leader, he was self-effacing, humble and generous, believing that brac’s works would speak for itself. Inside the organization, he was known to all simply as ‘Abed Bhai’, meaning brother. The organization founded and lead by Abed employed 100,000 people and reached out more than 100 million people in 11 countries of the world including Bangladesh providing education, healthcare, microfinance and other services. At the core of Abed’s idea was that the poor were poor because they were powerless.

Improvizing the lives of women and girls was the early focus of Brac’s work and central to its projects. Following the success of rehydration scheme, under which 14 million mothers were trained to administer a remedy by using sugar, salt and water, thus saved the lives of their children. brac had also been active into the education sector. By 1999, it ran more than 34,000 schools.

Abed was one the earliest proponents of microfinance in Bangladesh, believing that most poor the access of the finance was one of the biggest problems. Brac provides $4bn microcredit, annually. Later, he pioneered the “graduation approach” to sustainably help people out of extreme poverty. The model has been adopted in other countries, too.

Besides brac, Abed had been associated with different national and international organizations. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard Institute of International Development, Harvard University, USA during 1981-1982. He was the chairperson of Advisory Board of Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements based in Dhaka. He received many prestigious international awards such as the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1980; UNDP Mahbub ul Haq Award in 2004; and Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) 2010 awards. Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was honoured with a Dutch Knighthood in 2019. He received nearly a dozen honorary Doctorate degrees from US, UK, Japan and Canadian universities.

Brac has a unique ecosystem sustaining development programme, microfinance schemes, a shopping centre called Aarong, a university, bank and a range of other social enterprises.

Fazle Hasan Abed died on 20 December, 2019 at the age of 83. He is survived by wife, a daughter, a son and three grandchildren. [Sabbir Ahmed]