Duncan: Please note this comment is supposed to be a satirical take on the aid industry!

As you correctly point out, BRAC personnel costs are lower than western based International NGO’s and the development systems BRAC honed in Bangladesh have proven to be transportable to other countries.

BRAC’s efficiency and effectiveness is critical in countries where service providers compete for donor funds through government supervised competitive bidding (such as in Afghanistan).

Training is a key element of BRAC’s success.
They don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Inexperienced local employees, largely female, are trained to execute proven business models from Bangladesh. For these women it’s “the BRAC way or the highway”.

The results are positive. When BRAC entered Uganda there were over a hundred microfinance institutions active there. BRAC is now one of the largest MFI’s in that country.

In Afghanistan, BRAC operates two full time training centers where the ultimate goal is “Afghanistization”; to replace Bangladeshi employees with well trained Afghans capable of delivering development services.

In my opinion, BRAC’s international success is less of a new development paradigm than an example of old fashioned attention to detail. Like many successful businesses, BRAC breaks down the task into component parts, optimizes performance of each part, standardizes the process, trains employees, and measures performance.

In the development business you have to be good to do good…and BRAC is very good.

One side hasn’t come up yet in this discussion. Oxfam has the ability to push the development debate in the UK and globally and as a global organisation, to make it as representative of the south as possible. I’m sure some of this is a factor of its size.

However, is it “right” that a GB-based organisation has oversight of half a billion dollars of development spending?

I’m not saying there’s a simple answer as international development needs friends in the UK as much as in Bangladesh. But perhaps its a question that can properly be raised now we can start to talk of NGOs from the South of similar size.

These hard earned lessons about what not to do are worth protecting, though there are also aspects of BRAC’s different approach that Northern INGOs could usefully learn from. A bit of competition in public service delivery is probably no bad thing, for example, though achieving this without undermining public accountability is tricky.

It seems to me that as with China, the best answer is to get BRAC engaged in the wider INGO and donor debates around accountability, capacity, good governance. And BRAC should be more inclined to engage in this than China has proved to be, since BRAC at least shares the same overall goals as the INGO community.

When Chinese workers from the interior of China go to Africa, they impose less of a financial overhead as the conditions are somewhat similar to what they may have been used to.

I think it opens up some possibilities for greater effectiveness when you have workers from developing countries working in developing countries. From a sensibility standpoint. As long as their training is to world-class standards.

However I disagree with Ariful that “…despite lot of support from so many INGOs, poverty is not reducing at the level it was expected in developing countries and ramping corruption.”

BRAC is the largest NGO in Bangladesh and yet the country is still one of the poorest and ranked only a few positions above the last on corruption index.

There are black sheeps, but many NGOs are doing good works around the world. We live in a complex world and poverty is not 3-2=1.