Book Reviews / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 391–410 405

Ian Smillie (2009) Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC. Sterling, Virginia: Kumarian Press. 285 pages. ISBN: 978-1-56549-294-3.

Sixty years past since the inaugural of the Development Decade, there seems little to cele-brate. Poverty remains endemic especially in Asia. Inequality abounds. Despite increased allocations in ODA, there is hardly to show for in terms of impact. This seems to be the verdict of many development theorists and practitioners alike, each one united by the sin-gular critique of the shortcomings of development interventions, if not outright failures.

Ian Smillie’s book Freedom from Want (Kumarian Press, 2009) is a celebration of hopeful-ness and success in the face of intractable difficulties. This book is primarily about Fazle Hasan Abed — not necessarily an extraordinary human being at birth, did have privileges, went to London, became a British citizen, was exposed to the arts, literature and the good life in general. He would return to Bangladesh years later to work with Shell Oil, enjoy the hike up the corporate ladder, live a privileged life surrounded by servants and sycophants, and the perennial hobnobbing among businessmen and government executives until tropi-cal storm Nora on 5 November 1972 washed away most of the country. It was then that Abed became an extraordinary man.

Arriving in Manpura, a small narrow island that was hardest hit by the cyclone five day-slater, Abed saw the dead and bloated bodies of people and animals washed up on the shore. Manpura’s population was reduced by a third. Only 13,000 people had survived, all of them suffering from hunger and disease. The destruction was almost complete. This was Abed’s defining moment; for him, there was no turning back.

It is also the story of many other human beings who must have appreciated and recog-nised the circumstances of their country and chose, as Abed did, to respond. At the centre of this remarkable story are the millions of Bangladeshi women who challenged their birth-right and collectively decided against a course that would otherwise have kept them in permanent destitution, simply because they were women. This book wonderfully exempli-fies the theory of ‘human agency’, but does so without the cold abstractions of academic discourse. Rather, the ‘will to power’ is demonstrated over and over again through the lens of human activity, whether it be milk production, white leghorn-raising, worm-rearing or caterpillar-grazing on mulberry leaves. In all these activities designed to combat poverty, women are centre stage, seizing each and every opportunity to escape the social structures imposed on their gender.

What began as a relief effort in Abed’s house in 1972 is today, 50 years later, a transna-tional non-governmental organisation (NGO) — one that has defied all the arguments against NGO capacity for scale, reach and result.

BRAC has gone beyond Bangladesh. It is in Afghanistan, Haiti, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda, the Sudan — places where other development institutions might shy away due to the obvious restrictions imposed by the social and political conditions of these countries, or simply be unable to penetrate and deliver at the grassroots due to bureaucratic weight at the centre. BRAC was at the forefront of the post-tsunami reconstruction effort in Sri Lanka in 2004 and is exploring operations in India, China, Sierra Leone and Liberia. It has two fundraising arms, one in London and the other in New York. In the US alone, BRAC has raised almost US$ 70 million in 2009 for lending operations in Africa.

At home, BRAC’s performance is at a staggering scale that could easily rival any for-profit corporation. Its micro-lending portfolio reached US$ 1 billion in 2008. Its 2006

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156853111X577695

406 Book Reviews / Asian Journal of Social Science 39 (2011) 391–410

income from revenue generating activities stood at US$ 495 million, of which a miniscule 20% is provided by donors. It is an enterprise of 3,000 offices and 57,000 employees, easily 30 times larger than that of the Asian Development Bank. Yet, its highest salary along with allowances for health, travel and housing is 110,000 Bangladesh Taka, approximately US$ 20,000.

Over five decades since its transformation into a development NGO, BRAC has pro-vided livelihoods for both the rural and urban poor through 178,000 ponds altogether spanning a land area of over 23,000 hectares. BRAC University, founded in 1985, has graduated more than three million students. Through its Oral Therapy Expansion Program (OTEP) that started in 1979, BRAC’s simple message of Oral Rehydration Solution reached 12 million households and covered over 75,000 villages throughout Bangladesh. The list is far too long to enumerate here. Read the book.

Lest this success story be unvarnished by naïve optimism, Smillie cautions the reader through the realities of failure that did not escape even this seemingly formidable organisa-tion. Mulberry trees had to be cut down due to rising prices on land, coupled with the inability to compete with China’s low cost labour, put an end to ambitions of competing in the global silk market. The scourge of avian flu in 2007 nearly wiped out BRAC’s poultry production with the slaughter of 1.6 million birds. A ‘democratic deficit’ throughout the country provides a sobering portrayal of the limits of NGO interventions in a country whose political issues remain highly contentious and unresolved.

Most critical of all is Bangladesh’s overall socioeconomic profile. The 2009 UNDP Human Development Report ranks Bangladesh at 123 among 177 countries. Its per capita income in PPP terms is US$ 1,241 in 2007, only slightly better than Tanzania (US$ 1,208), Burkina Faso (US$ 1,124) and Mali (US$ 1,086). Disaggregated by gender, the income figures worsen. GDP per capita for Bangladeshi women is US$ 830 opposed to US$ 1,633 for men — an almost two-fold difference in income between men and women. Such num-bers can douse the reader’s faith.

BRAC’s accomplishments in a short period of time cannot be understated though. Certainly not when compared to thousands of other bigger and better-funded organisa-tions attempting to solve poverty. To put it more succinctly, if a US president (Bill Clinton) tells Fazle Abed, ‘When I leave the presidency, I want to do what you do’ and that ‘people like Abed are proving without a doubt that one person can change the world,’ then no statistic can underplay the global impact of one person and one organisation. Not bad for someone who started a feeding programme for shifts of 50 people out of his house after a cyclone.

Teresita Cruz-Del RosarioVisiting Associate ProfessorLee Kuan Yew School of Public PolicyNational University of Singapore