Microfinance Focus, January 27, 2012: Development organization BRAC has been ranked fourth in the list of top hundred Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the world by the Global Journal.

BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) was established by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 1972 alongside the Grameen Bank. Currently, BRAC reaches more than 110 million people with its holistic, sustainable approach to poverty reduction that uses these micro-finance groups as a social platform to deliver scaled-up services in health, education, business development and livelihood support.

Moreover, the organization has expanded its model into nine other countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. It has disbursed approximately $5 billion in micro-loans to date.

Presently, BRAC is doing everything from training door-to-door health volunteers, to implementing a mobile health project whereby volunteers can share real-time information about their patients, to running 32,000 informal ‘BRAC Schools’, and giving almost 7 million people access to sanitary latrines.

BRAC is in many ways a microcosm of the entire international development sector in one organization, says the Global Journal. BRAC covers almost 80 percent of its $485 million budget through a number of social enterprises, including a dairy project, a chain of retail handicraft stores, a pioneering poultry venture and commercial fish farming.

BRAC has also established a standalone Research and Evaluation Division that collaborates with academic and research institutions and other development organizations to gauge the effectiveness of its interventions.

Looking ahead, BRAC is preparing to shift its focus towards city-based schemes in anticipation of the projected one-third growth in Bangladesh’s population over the next five years.