BRAC: Building a System to Solve Problems at Scale

In 1972, Fazle Hasan Abed left a senior role at Shell to help rebuild a flood-ravaged village in newly independent Bangladesh. He did not arrive with a plan. He arrived with a question: why do good solutions so often fail to reach the people who need them most?

What followed was five decades of relentless iteration. BRAC began as a small relief operation and grew into the world’s largest NGO, operating across 15 countries, running schools, microfinance programs, social enterprises, and humanitarian responses, and touching the lives of an estimated 100 million people. It did so not by scaling a single intervention but by building a system: one in which each program revealed the next problem, and each solution was tested in the field before it was expanded anywhere else.

The case traces BRAC’s organizational logic from its origins in rural Bangladesh through its development of the Shasthya Shebika community health worker model, the Graduation program for ultra-poor households, and its hybrid financing structure, which funded roughly 70 to 80 percent of operations through its own social enterprises. It examines what happened when BRAC tried to take that model abroad, and what Afghanistan taught the organization about the difference between a method and a relationship.

By 2026, BRAC faces a set of compounding pressures: rapid urbanization in Bangladesh, intensifying climate displacement, deepening government partnerships that strain its founding apolitical identity, and a leadership succession following Abed’s death in December 2019. The organization he built is intact. Whether the system that made it work can survive what it has become is the question his successors must now answer.