By Greg Chen | Managing Director, BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative I am delighted to have joined BRAC UPGI as the Managing Director late in 2021. I have long been inspired by BRAC and its Graduation approach. For more than 25 years, I’ve worked to advance financial inclusion through microfinance and digital finance. I have a … Continued
By Dr. Imran Matin | Executive Director, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development This article originally appeared in Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) on January 5, 2022. Read it here. The development community has been heavily researching and discussing cash transfers over the past decade, publishing hundreds of studies and scores of articles on their … Continued
By Shameran Abed | Executive Director, BRAC International; Joanne Carter | Executive Director, RESULTS; and Barbara Jackson | Vice President: Programs, TrickleUp This article originally appeared in World Economic Forum (WEF) on November 24, 2021. Read it here. A whopping $90-100 billion is on the World Bank’s International Development Association‘s (IDA) negotiating table in 2021 … Continued
By Shameran Abed | Executive Director, BRAC International; Joanne Carter | Executive Director, RESULTS; and Barbara Jackson | Vice President: Programs, TrickleUp Far from the limelight, global leaders are on the cusp of striking a historic and unprecedented financing deal for spurring pandemic recovery through the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA), a mechanism overseen … Continued
By Julie Kedroske | Acting Director of Technical Assistance, BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative This article originally appeared in Inter Press Service News Agency on October 21, 2021. Read it here. NEW YORK, Oct 21 2021 (IPS) – As the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, approaches (31 October -12 November in Glasgow, … Continued
This article originally appeared in InDepthNews on October 14, 2021. DHAKA (IDN) — It is time we start treating extreme poverty as the global emergency it is. This International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, October 17, we are looking at 100 million more people being forced into extreme poverty by the end of 2021 … Continued
By Shameran Abed | Executive Director, BRAC International This article originally appeared in Project Syndicate on July 26, 2021. From 1990 to 2019, the number of people living in extreme poverty (according to the World Bank threshold of $1.90 per day) plummeted, from 1.9 billion to 648 million. COVID-19 has reversed much of this progress. … Continued
When Marlowe Popes joined the Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative in 2017 as BRAC Field Manager for the DOLE Graduation pilot, he never imagined he’d be guiding his team and almost two thousand project participants through a pandemic. When one of the world’s longest running lockdowns began in the Philippines due to COVID-19, Marlowe’s team was tasked with … Continued
By Rozina Haque | Programme Head, BRAC Ultra-Poor Graduation Programme The launch of the World Bank’s State of Economic Inclusion Report 2021 provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the integral role learning and adaptation has played in BRAC’s programming, particularly on the success of the Ultra-Poor Graduation program (UPG) in Bangladesh (detailed in a … Continued
By Amy Lieberman | U.N. Correspondent, Devex This article originally appeared in Devex on December 21, 2020. Climate change disproportionately impacts the world’s most impoverished. So, experts are asking, why can’t they receive direct compensation and support? …“Most people wouldn’t readily say that they are moving because of climate change. They are looking at the … Continued