London Creative Labs

Young professional arrives to work at the BRAC Dhaka headquarters.

What a New Year’s Eve gift to the world; the recognition of another outstanding man from Bangladesh. Some of our friends will know that  London Creative Labs was started out of the inspiration of BRAC as one of two giants to have transformed Bangladesh. Of course the other inspirational giant is Grameen and it has been a fantastic year for Global Grameen. How satisfying and even thrilling to see BRAC now being raised to the kind of stage it should have been on for a good few years now.

Why is BRAC wonderful?

When I heard that Fazle Abed’s inspirations were Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire and other revolutionary figures in liberating educational ideology, the ‘BRAC way’ made sense to me. What they have done is truly liberate people from their situation, and their interventions are systemic in nature.

Young entrepreneurs on the streets of Dhaka

Bangladeshi’s audacity of hope: See this wonderful article on BRAC

BRAC in the UK

It was a pleasure earlier this year to meet BRAC-UK’s director Sandra Kabir, who has been mentored by Fazle Abed for twenty years, and who has successfully rooted BRAC in the UK. This is no small achievement and I am was impressed at how many women and children they had already reached in the time here. Sandra described how on a budget of £40,000 they managed to reach 2000 Bangladeshi women, teaching them financial literacy. London Creative labs looks forward to collaborate with BRAC in 2010.

My wish for BRAC is that their ‘way’ gets more global recognition, and especially their deeper principles so that they can be attributed and so that the core ideas can be replicated or at least become the cause for more disruptive innovation in the world. Congratulations to Fazel Abed and BRAC worldwide for four incredible decades.

Fazle Abed’s biography

The official press release