ED welcome to Abedian.app: It took half a century of maps by worldclassengineer Fazle Abed to integrate the 30 cooperations of community building by 1 billion poorest Asian Village mothers. Economists' diaries of The 30th cooperation begun with Economist dialogues at the height of subprime 2008 , involved 8 years of humansai pre-training that became 8 billion beings united declaration of 17 sustainability/cooperation development goals and has converged with the 8 years to date of Guterres roadmapping of UN2 comprised of 9 dynamic subystems of above zero-sum human networking. Bangladesh as deepest place branding of SDG5 celebrates being 52 years young in 2023 the 265th year of smithian moral sentiments at Abed's Alma mater Glasgow Universiity. Supporting hi-tech hi-trust Asian place winners include: singapore 2023; hong kong (22.1 Place winners 22.22022 ... Thailand2021 ..) . Abed was not just a world class civil engineer; he dedicated half a century until his death in December 2019 as servant leader. Aligned by HG Wells bon mots: civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe, Abed Bhai preferred to be seen as host of microeducationsummit not financiers summits: his gravitation purpose of 30 women empowered cooperations that of united refugees, villagers and civil societies in ENDING POVERTY. Fortunately for the worlds poorest new nation Bangaldesh 1971- Abed had networks like no other community leader. HIs friends' coop roadmapping reached out to intel vitalised by at least a billion village mothers in tropical inland asia where, a third of infants were dying of diarrhea before Abed's person to person networking became the best news ever chatted. Fro mid 1950s studies in Glasgow he spent nearly 13 years growing to be Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company's regional CEO. So his lifetime searches uniquely capitalised on what UK and Dutch Royal Societies (soon Japan Royals too) knew how to help end the poverty their colonial era had up to 1945 trapped the majority of humans world trade in. Simply put most Asian coastal belts link national borders defined by what these < a href="http://www.kc3.dev">3 kingdoms designed in to trading barriers over nearly half millennium. And which had made the English language that of world class engineering (digital age as well as pre-digital) So by 1970s these nations royal societies (including londons arts green-geographical, medicinie, science, architects ...) were happy that a grounded movement could link them into what they didnt fully know culturally or consciously. From 1970 on Abed linked in global village mapping like no one else - through these relationships and by designing business microfrachises not charity wherever possible for village women to own. To study with abed alumni is to join in the world's most cooperative empowering women movements for good as well as of childrens development.
EconomistScotland.com: 2023 would have been dad Norman's centenary as well as 73rd year co-working with Von Neumann and maps of SUSTAINABILITY GENERATION. Notably, EconomistGames.com is inspired by 3 Glasgow U alumni: Adam Smith James Watt, FAZLE ABED ..Current Intel compasses of AbedMooc.com include:
  • U Last Mile Health

  • U Early Childhood

  • U finance to end poverty


  • let's celebrate triple-win economics=
    end poverty*grow middle class*go green

SDG 5  4  3   2  1  0 welcome to Asia and the top 5 sdgoals 50 years search scaling the most exciting collaborations women-led communities empower
INDUSTRIAL REV 260th GAMES-cards of sdg-gen
..
diary: next UN sdg-games
250th year review of moral sentiments and industrial revolution
.
www.ukcop26.org/volunteer

green economics- the younger half of the world's only hope
Coming soon Fieldbook of Fazle Abed and 1 billion girls empowerment. I see these as 7 chapters of the fieldbook of Abed and womens nation building. Are you able to see if Shameran Abed agrees these are close to honoring his father's purpose or do you want me to do that?
Chapter 1 Ending poverty with financial services - Chapter 2 Ending famine with village agriculture and 100% employment of women geared to community building and celebrating nation's market/entrepreneurial advantages
Chapter 3 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
Chapter 4 Education designed to value's the (girl/boy) child's life, love of self, communal dignity of everyone as an action learner and livelihood co-creator Chapter 5 Community as (global village) platform search for collaboration in resiliency and family-led conscious effort to respect every person and nature's dynamics

Chapter 6 Did Abed discover optimal framework matching The Economist's 150 year searching for Entrepreneurial Revolution ie a third movement to mediate historic empires, big politics and big corporate through intergenerational and inter-hemisphere sharing of advances in engineering. Specifically matching Von Neumann's definition of industrial revolution 3 as era of above zero-sum value exchange modeling coherent with 100 times more tech per 8 decades 1945-2025 compounding to everyone's collaborative and natural advantage. Chapter 7 Exploring Abed's checklist of the most urgent work to be done through the decade after his passing and purpose of the younger half of the world in connecting first true decade of sustainability generation through hi-trust behaviors and borderless transparency of data mapping integrating every GPS

 https://engineering.stanford.edu/people/fei-fei-li probably most important tech for sdgs connector in world today ; secondly people abed inspired are trying to transform un via https://www.un.org/techenvoy/content/ongoing-work now led by indian civil servant amandeep gill;; guterres is making this his signature transformation but the 4 people who started this in 2016 after abed's 80th birthday jim kim  ban ki-moon jack ma and melinda gates dont seem to know the indian civil servant amandeep gill who has taken over - also when kim got education un to finally connect with geneva it was through 2 propel: kituyi who then led unctad but may be rival to ruto and houlin zhao whose 8 years chair itu has just gone; its not clear whats happening with kenya unhabitat but hope to observe mar 22-25 new york with singapore friend jack sim number 1 practice connector of sdg6 www.worldtoilet.org and www.bophub.org - jack is the one person I can regularly communicate with have introduced john to jack and vincent chang who has just ended 4 years leading brac university but john is having up to 70 million property assets stolen from him by the person he though was his 45 year partner so not able to focus this month; meanwhile the metaverse has become a race - culturally can womens kindness take back web spaces - johns honk kong friend  jeanne lim www.beingai.com having a good go; johns most powerful friend in ny remains chandrika tandon sponsor of nyu engineering campus in shanghai; unfortunately these dots need connecting ; I may need to relocate to glasgow as it has lower cost of living and currently cant find one project to work on; i want to finish last book dad worked with von neumann family since 1951- dad and i started co-authoring 2025 report genre from 1984; it seems the world really is at final sdg ai crossroads; sadly cant find which one human being bow represents all that fazle did for bangladesh- if you ever chat to monica yunus i would like to know how much succession she will take on ( - at brac i have to assume it couid be shameran but cant fond way to communicate with hum and I am told that tamara and asif sent 25 family members to eg glasgow cop26 - not one was up to fazle level of connecting -anyhow I dont want people politics around ai for good - thats a maths thing- john and i have found www.nexteinstein.org training 100 brilliant mathematicians for africa .... still know sunita gandhi scalling literacy across india like never before -so if you kmnow which countries become pivotal to your diary please tell me ahead of time so i can shoirtlist who just might be the extra connector women empiwerment needs lastly this shows some examples of chatgpt and why iot may be possible to redsign brac uni around it http://innovations.ning.com/forum/topics/what-if-ai-wants-humans-intel-to-be-sustainable  - overall until trumps wave of hate if china disapates I am focusing on singapore and hong kong - all through my life those 2 groups of 8 million people have multiplied so much good

welcome to SDGscotland. lifelong action learning on ending poverty, celebrating health #AIforgood (glasgow's 260th year of first engineer james watt & first IR economist adam smith): growing green:
humanity's last best chance ...economistdiary.com -
THANKS be TO Glasgow U alumn fazle abed- small may be beautiful but in ending poverty, large scale coalition empowering women community building is essential..1billiongirls.com asks how many 1 billion dollar sdg investments a year can women empowerment coalitions inspire: brac bangladesh billion dollar microfinance loans ; abed ultra poor billion dollar grants a year; bkash billion dollar cashless banking for poor ; brac bank billion dollar youth engagement and sme city bank; billion dollars of lowest cost remittances; billion dollar investments in each of 5 ages of schooling ; billion dollar vaccine empowering poorest families grants ; 15 agricultural value chains whose crop science and ai data is networked around poorest asian farmers...


Saturday, March 6, 2021

 https://www.mcleodgroup.ca/2019/12/sir-fazle-hasan-abed-master-builder/

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed: Master Builder

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed: Master Builder

By Ian Smillie, December 30, 2019

Several members of the McLeod Group had the privilege of knowing and working with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC, one of the world’s top NGOs (see our recent blog). He passed away on December 20, and we wanted to share an appreciation of him with our readers. His biography can be found on the BRAC website. We offer our sincere condolences to his family, to BRAC, and to all those whose lives were touched by him.   

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of BRAC in the global effort to end poverty. It is equally difficult to separate its success from the life and work of the man who created and steered it through almost five decades, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed – “Abed bhai” to his colleagues, “Abed” to his friends.

BRAC’s size and reach are – by any measure – staggering. Its microfinance lending, mostly to poor rural women, exceeds $1 billion a year. Although BRAC is a leader in the field of microfinance – touted for a few years as the miracle remedy for poverty – Abed never saw it as a cure-all. In his mind, the key to ending poverty was new, productive enterprise. Poor people, especially women and especially in rural areas, had to make things. And to do that, they had to be better linked to resources – seeds, fertilizer, knowledge, finance – and to markets. BRAC’s social enterprises in dairy, poultry, silk, handicrafts, seed multiplication, and a dozen other areas, have created hundreds of thousands of livelihoods, and in time they generated income that has made BRAC largely self-financing. Microfinance was the fuel in the tank, but the engine was always innovative, productive enterprise.

The BRAC Bank, completely separate from the microfinance operations, holds deposits of more than $2 billion and has a Moody’s long-term credit rating as good as that of Barclays Bank. Facts like these might catch the eye of a banker. But BRAC was and remains an NGO with its primary focus on social development, ranked for the past four years by the Geneva-based NGO Advisor as Number 1 on a list of 500 global non-profits.

BRAC pioneered non-formal primary education, mostly for girls, aiming to give literacy, dignity and hope to the next generation of mothers. Its groundbreaking oral rehydration training programs in the 1970s reached nine out of ten rural households in Bangladesh. That, along with innovative health, nutrition and sanitation programs, contributed to a seven-fold reduction in the country’s child mortality. Fewer child deaths, better education and more economic opportunity, especially for women, led to a three-fold drop in the fertility rate, ending worries about unchecked population growth.

There’s hardly an area of human development that BRAC hasn’t touched in a meaningful way, taking some of its best lessons to Africa and other parts of Asia. Fazle Hasan Abed did not accomplish this all on his own. But he was able to find and motivate others – individuals, government departments, donor agencies and some of the world’s most powerful and influential policy makers. His ambition was boundless, but it rested on a quiet charisma that inspired devotion and made mountains seem scalable. He listened far more than he spoke.

I first met Abed in 1973, when BRAC was just a handful of people working out of a flat in Motijheel. It was an unlikely, almost accidental enterprise, created by a man whose life until then couldn’t possibly have suggested what was to come. He had lived comfortably for several years in London, and then worked as a senior Shell Oil accountant in Chittagong. There, he took time off to spearhead relief efforts following the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 War of Independence.

Discovering the deeply entrenched poverty he had failed to notice during his privileged youth, he created what he thought would be a small, time-bound demonstration effort to show what might be accomplished with a few farming cooperatives, adult literacy and health training. A lesser man would have run from the resulting failures, but for Abed, they were lessons to be remembered and applied to the much bigger voyage on which he then embarked.

When I was completing research in 2009 for a book about BRAC, Freedom from Want, and trying to think about what had made it so successful, outsiders frequently told me it was Abed’s experience with the private sector. I always doubted that. Shell perhaps gave him useful perspectives on money and management, but it could not have been the source of his ingenuity, his compassion and sense of injustice, his willingness to take risks and his insistence on learning what works, what does not, and why. He told me that a lot of it was luck, and laughed, quoting Napoleon: “Give me lucky generals.”

I investigated the concept of luck and found a good summary: “Being ready for the opportunity.” Abed was always able, better than most, to see and understand opportunity. By that definition, “luck” may well have played a part.

He suggested I talk with an employee who had recently returned from doctoral studies in Britain – she might have a helpful perspective on BRAC’s success. She said she had expected to find a saint or a genius around every corner, but in the end, that wasn’t the case. The answer was “common sense” – everything BRAC has achieved came about, she said, through the application of common sense. I put that in the book, but in truth Abed did have the versatility of genius, a talent for applying common sense in a world where the concept is largely unknown and an ability to unlock doors long closed to innovation, justice and human development.

Abed never rested on well-deserved laurels; he always argued that “big” is essential in confronting poverty. Most ambitious people, however, leave a trail of wreckage and animosity behind them. With Abed, it was quite the opposite, and that too must be part of BRAC’s success – his unflappability in the face of tremendous odds and personal tragedy, his ability to build and to bring diverse people and resources together in common cause.

Sir Christopher Wren, visiting the construction site for St. Paul’s Cathedral, is said to have asked a stonemason what he was doing. “I’m cutting stone,” the man said. Further along, Wren asked another stonemason what he was doing. He replied, “I’m building a cathedral.” Abed was both Christopher Wren and the stonemason, and while BRAC in it many manifestations will continue to thrive, the legacy will always be his: Abed, Master Builder.

Ian Smillie is a development professional and foreign aid critic.

Monday, March 1, 2021