BRAC

Mm.

And until today, they own, you know, all the rental businesses, what used to be called BRAC, Budget Rent a Car, which is now Avis and Budget, and all of course, all of the retailers, all the car retail shops.

And I remember as a little kid who knew nothing about M&A activities, sticking my hand up in a core finance meeting and saying, "Please put me on that account because I know everything there is to know about McCarthy."

Yes.

But can it be delivered at scale to match the scale of poverty in our world today? Welcome to Ideas in Development, a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research.

I'm Oliver Hany, the Managing Editor here at VoxDev, and my guest today is Stephanie Brockerhoff, who is the Director for Program Design and Impact for BRAC's UltraPoor Graduation Initiative.

Stephanie, welcome to Ideas in Development.

Thanks for having me.

So BRAC is widely ranked as the biggest NGO in the world, depending on how you define that ranking exactly.

For those who don't know it, what is BRAC and what does it do?

As some of your listeners might know, BRAC was initially founded in the early 1970s and became a very large development organization within Bangladesh over the next two

decades or so.

And what is remarkable to see is that there are international non-governmental organizations that are growing from Asia.

BRAC from Bangladesh, Mercy Malaysia, which does medical missions in West Asia to Africa.

It's remarkable.

So people always help each other.

And then it starts to really work, and other people see it, and they take parts of what those organizations did.

And, and some of them move it into a mindset that is really too much about the money, and we saw this in microfinance that started in seventy-six, let's say, with Muhammad Yunus and Abed from BRAC and Ela Bhatt from the Self-Employed Women's Association.

Um, by two thousand and ten-- two thousand and eight, during the financial crisis, you were seeing not only significant microfinance institutions, but I was literally being pitched by major European investment banks to sit on their advisories because their fund structures to invest in microfinance, um, were the most profitable funds they had.

And I was like: Could you just take a beat and realize that you are asking me to sit on the advisory for a fund that's making more money than any of your other funds? Based on lending to the poorest women in the world.

You're here to listen to her, so I will not say any more.

Other than, welcome to Shweta Banerjee, who's the head of BRAC International, and if you don't know who BRAC is, by the end of tonight you will, and you will be very impressed, as I was when I first found out about 20 years ago.

So now, without further ado, Esther, take it away.

[audience applauding]

... talk since I don't have slides.

Very good evening to all of you.

Uh, thank you very much to the London School of Economics, uh, Professor Burgess for inviting BRAC to share some thoughts at this very exciting LSC Environment Week.

So imagine that decision-makers in the West or the Global North, supported by a majority of their voting population, actually agree to Professor Duclos' proposal.