chapter synopsis 3 health

 Chapter 3 Core to nation building of Bangladesh's fisrt 50 years was raising life expectancy from 25 below to close to world norms through maximising last mile health service capacity with collaboration focus on affordable life-shaping solutions for infants and mothers

 While the new nation of Bangladesh wasnot known for world class inventions in 1971, it did have one medical solution that would rock the world of pediatrics. In poor tropical (humid) nations up to a third of infants die of diarrhea. If a mother knows (Oral Hydration) how to mix boiled water, sugar and salt in correct proportions she can save her infants life. While this invention was discovered in the East Pakisan cholera lab, nobody had found a way to market a potentially zero-cost cure. The networking of this across the whole rural nation of Bangladesh and over to China was to be what the first 3 head office employees of brac found partners to action network principally Unicef’s James Grant who was overjoyed both to fund brac’s nationwide oral rehydration educational campaign to every village mother and make his own life’s work that of storytelling OR to every developing nation leader.

During brac’s first 14 years Abed's focus was designing business microfranchises; accepting a huge grant like UNICEF’s was the exception. The opportunity from brac wining the un year of the child competition and it was what extended brac’s rural womens networking from the 100000 person metavillage (see chapter 5) to practically the whole rural nation. Almost as miraculous as Oral Rehydration is the first health service microfranchise Abed designed – a sort of doordash of 12 non prescription medicines franchised as a weekly visit to 300 homes per village mother making a living as a para-health servant. This also led to these mothers (which grew into 80000 village businees-women) being the most trusted guide to all sorts of health happenings.  Read on - chapter 3 coming soon

synopsis chapter 1 financial services to end poverty

  Chapter 1 Ending poverty with financial services

Synopsis – over 50 years Abed designed financial services to connect all of the nation’s value chain of banking so that the very smallest business owner was included in affordable loans and good savings provided she worked hard and met her community’s life shaping needs. In 1971, when Bangladesh began as a new nation, 90% of people were rural. – most rural men were unbanked; in the case of rural women almost zero enjoyed financial services. From village banking for microfranchisees to city banking for SMEs and first generation citizens from rural to international remittances half a century has seen human development around a lot of financial service segmentation- Thanks to Abed those families starting with the least were never forgotten. Remarkably bkash.com the world’s largest cashless banking system in terms of user population was one of the most recent consequences of partnering those who agreed with Abed’s purpose of banking as intergenerational in exponential impact and thus core to collaboratively celebrating sustainability goals

Chapter 4 EDUCATION Synopsis

 

Chapter 4 Education designed to value's the (girl/boy) child's life, love of self, collaborative teamwork, communal dignity of everyone as an action learner and livelihood co-creator

Most of 21^st Century brac’s hundred thousand people are skills trainers distributed across rural Bangladesh who value Paulo Freire culture of service learning -indeed St Francis’ quest that female followers practice community health servants and male followers celebrate being nature’s deepest connectors; of course, here are a few engineers too; but I can’t remember having met a bureaucrat in the organization that Abed facilitated. Nowhere is data deeper than when you ensure you are always searching out what the poorest need to be included in the future   

Frankly speaking the foundation of brac around skills trainers started from Abed’s biggest mistake. As one of Asia’s leading young engineers, in 1972 he used his life savings to build 15000 homes for 100000 people whose region had been flattened by the war of independence. Bangladesh is a crowded nation but in other ways Abed’s metavillage 5.1 was one of the most disconnected space in the tropics. No electricity, no engines of any kind.  No sooner than this was built than Abed found dozens of women were dying each week of starvation; scores on infants were dying from dehydration. The desperate “educational” need was to develop business micro franchises in food production and last mile health services- and to train village mothers to operate these with positive cash flows however small but compounding positively

Thus 4.1 WOMENS LIVELIHOOD TRAINING – Through microfranchise design 1.1 and training village mothers’ productive community building to end poverty and actioning sustainability goals started what has become civil society’s most collaborative and largest 21^st C partnership network

Bangladesh was born 8^th largest and poorest nation 90% rural ie villagers without access to electricity. So women empowered action learning networks were all person to person. About 15 years into Bangladesh’s development village mothers could afford to demand village schooling for their children.

4.2 PRIMARY Brac built the largest non-government primary school system – over 40000 one room schools in little more than a decade.  Village mothers operated these schools using brac’s own learning materials. Above all Abed designed in a loving environment for kids t experience but at age 11 moist outperformed city schools run by the government. Designing many children’s  only 6 years of learning made it important to add in “missing curricula”: financial literacy is paractised at 2^nd grade onwards; because brac village mothers deliver most of the last mile health services, health and safety practices are bult into the culture of being a brac student.

4.3 PARTNERS IN SECONDARY – GIRLS JOBS APPRENTICESHIPS PLUS. For various reasons including millennium goals focus on primary schools, Abed could not assemble funds fordesigning secondary schools. Instead he built mainly girls apprentice clubs to partner libaries as well as secondary school scholarships. Brac’s community culture maximised livelihood support for children/families that it linkedin

4.4 UNIVERSITY. 1996: In the second quarter of a century of Brac and Abed’s work tech partners in the form of solar, mobile started to come to the villages. Abed started up brac university. Everything brac and village women empowered networks could be updated there, and much more including the request probably first made by Mrs Stave Jobs that Abed work out which of Bangladesh women’s solutions could be extended to other countries. So, while the university aimed to be sustainability’s best national university, abed wanted to design solutions that graduates of collaborative sdg universities could apply the world over.

4.5 ECP. Early Childhood Playschools were a gap in education all over the world. So, brac university offered Asia’s first masters in ECP. Giving children the earliest experience of a loving space to developm has special advantages in places brac works from the poorest villages to refugee situations. Partners in Early Childhood Playschools can bring world class psychological inputs; and indeed, clarify why brain science supports action learning as the most effective method in so many skills from arts to computer coding to microentrepreneurship.

4.6 Luminaries of Education, Collaboration and Urgent Sustainability Generation. Anything humanity doesn’t yet know how to do- including living sustainably with nature- can only be massively solvable by Education. Before he died, Abed passed on the idea if education luminaries to Hong Kong and tech billionaire Charles Yidan and his newly emerging 4-hemispher education foundation: Yidan Prize & Yidan Luminaries. Luminaries connect practitioners if education with practitioners of anything that can be a solution youth need to be the first SD Generation. each year as well as celebrating new prize winners, luminaries are connecting 4-hemisphere stages for celebrating advances of 360 degree education – today and discipline including tech wizards can positively interact with bringing up the younger half of the world as first SDG generation. For example, Yidan’s director of partnerships is also entrepreneur in residence at Stanford. From Bangladesh to Hong Kong to Stanford to Cambridges (Boston and England) to Oxford to Wuhan let girls and boys joy of co-creating shine.

Chapter 5 - Designing Sustainability's 6 Decades of Collaboration Platforms Sustaining Women Empowered Community

related synopses chapter 1 finance ; chapter 2 feed ; chapter 3 health;  chapter 4 educate 

Chapter 5 Designing meta-partnerships for community’s most exciting collaborations in sustainability

Synopsis Goal 5 Partner collaborations with Abed’s Billion Community ABC: NEWS – New Economics Womens Sustainability

If you were privileged to be a fly on the wall in any of the 50 years that Asia’s leading young oil company engineer (Fazle Abed) turned to suppirting village women end extreme poverty (starting 1970- cyclone kills million people around Fazle Abed ; 20^th dec 2019 Abed’s last day on earth) you would have heard future debates on who in the world would join us in not just relieving this urgent crisis but empowering women to develop sustainable futures for their next generation

Over the half century, we identify these as 6 most exciting compasses (each multiplying development possibilities) which Abed as Moral Engineer invited partners to co-create -The Economist's 1970s  entrepreneurial revolution quest in Abed's case so that a billion poorest women agented the end of poverty (apart from preventing extinction of all of us - the greatest miracle any economist will ever get a window into)

5.1 100000 personmetavillage – as far away from the first 210 years of humans and machines as you could find on earth in 1972. (Building 15000 homes with his life’s savings was in one sense Abed’s biggest mistake-- no sooner than this community was built than he found dozens of village mothers dying of famine in the village pathways each week – why hadn’t he focused first on the action learning challenge of designing village mothers’ micro franchises of food security and last mile health services – each day he failed to attract sustainable investment partners was a death trap for a few more village mothers)

5.2 Billion Girls Collabnetworking Fortunately the same sense of urgency was going on in tropical village China when women were also being told they were now responsible for equaling male productivity. The most exciting micro franchise swaps started – Chinese mothers wanted to learn oral rehydration, the Chinese had the rice seed most closely adapted to Bangladesh’s most unusual seasons/ecologies. Every entrepreneurial compass to end poverty was worth experimentally swapping apart from financing which for obvious reasons had different sources – compass 2 agricultural food security, compass 3 last mile health, compass 4 skills education, compass 5 100% women inclusion in village productivity. Extraordinarily 25 years before the UN declared sustainability development goals a billion Asian women knew what their life’s work needed to be adapted round!

5.3 Brac Internet -giant leap for rural girl-kind– 1996 saw bracnet brought by Japanese and Silicon Valley partners

5.4 Brac & Asia's 100 SDG University Partnership -What a double leap for mother earth – 2001 Abed partners start Asian's new university movement –aimed at attracting the world of researchers and data mapping most linked to the bottom 2 billion women and mens development. In launching a University in Dhaka in 2001 , Brac was also seeking collaborations wherever universities wanted their new graduates to scale up local worldwide solutions (see eg early childhood schools or ultra poverty graduation) that 50 million or more people urgently needed to get back onto sustainability orbits. The 21st C had commenced with Abed feeling a double sense pressure – he could see new tech accelerating impacts in Bangladesh that put brac in a business race to complete nationwide value chains but Mrs Steve Jobs had also asked him at a millennial goals party: why don’t you serve/share your goal's solutions with the rest of women's world? Sustainability world's most collaborative universities was to be the way to keep this intergenerational and inter-hemisphere commitment practical.  

5.5 Climate smart-adaptability village networks- we talk a lot about sustainability smart city exchanges and heck do we need deep trust in mediating that – but don’t forget village women worlds also needs to travel through the last decade when preventing extinction is possible

5.6 zoom my last chances up scotty- perhaps there is poetic climate justice that the 260^th year of what the heck did Glasgow start up around machines became a blended mediation where at least as much was being innovated in borderless zooms as the leaders thrones physically situated in Glasgow – the greatest human interest story continues at ecop26.com and where are you linking in from

chapter 2 agriculture to end famine and to raise future hope -synopsis

 

- Chapter 2 Ending famine with village agriculture and 100% employment of women geared to community building and celebrating nation's market/entrepreneurial advantages

Through the third quarter of the 20th century, famine was the biggest killer of Bangladeshi and Chinese people. 

Fortunately solutions to ending famine in Asia had been demonstrated during the extraordinary peacemaking umbrella Americans had provided to the three far north eastern islands and peninsulars after world war 2.

KNOWHOW NETWORK SAVING THIRD OF WORLD LIVES- BORLAUGS GREEN REVOLUTION. By 1960, Alumni of Borlaug had shown that Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese people could produce up to ten times more rice locally than had been historically understood. The 1960s was decade that Abed had become a rising Asian star at the Anglo-Dutch Shell Oil company, So Abed could easily find out where this green revolution was advancing across Asia. 

Whilst many of the innovations Abed designed into village businesses took extraordinary entrepreneurial creativity, the first business microfranchises he designed for village mothers (in the 100000 person metavillage he had built in 1972 -(see chapter 5) tapped into thie obvious urgent need for local food security actionable by choosing relevant local adaptation.

 Bangladesh’s tropical part of the Asan continent is not an exact enough match for rice productivity with the far  (north) eastern places that had already succeeded with Borlaug-type seed customisation. The nearest successful adaptation had been made by tropical Chinese villagers. They were only too happy to swap their knowhow on how to end starvation with Bangladesh’s knowhow on oral rehydration (see chapter 3). 

It's fascinating to see Abed’s sequential rollout of women-villager led markets – from rice to veggies for vitamins infants need not to stunt, to his first wife’s passion (Aravind) for village crafts including agriculture of silk cultivation targeted at gaining revenues from rich citizens, to what has become 14 value chains that 21^st C brac enterprise lead nationally so village mothers are included in sustainable entrepreneurship. Of course other least developed nations may gain from a different profile of which agricultural markets to integrate around rural communities – but question – do you know of any other developing nations that has generated over half a century  such purposefully matched agricultural development by and for rural families? Why or why not?

Footnote in 2020s Bangladesh has 3 main ways of earning foreign currency:

Agricultural

Garments

Remittances

All three Bangladesh trades exist today because of empowering rural women to hold up half the sky. If economics is a moral let alone an exponentially sustainable profession it should demand truth in understanding how miracles of extreme poverty happened. We can learn from how both Bangladesh and Chinese women were the secret sauce of the greatest human development in history. We shouldn't be surprised that female villagers were loving enough to thank their networking connectors for sharing what life critical bottom-up solutions worked. The sources of finance were completely different. The Asset bases of the nations incomparably different. The mechanisms that changed women's role from breeding to business entrepreneurship were different. But in these extinction-prevention 2020s fake studies of clues we have to human sustainability will compound crises at every national border. The older half of the world bares an extreme responsibility for stopping ideology traps from destroying the younger half of our species. This was one reason why Abed's favorite topic of conversation in the 12 years 50 friends and I were lucky enough to study brac's future history was the collaboration of 100 Asian universities 95.4) whose graduates transparent connectivity would be crucial to diversity mapping- we get one dccade where human and artificial intel comes together: lets make sure the bottom up foundations of that mimic nature not manmade power games.