Established in 1972 to aid in the nation-building efforts of a country emerging from the ruins of its liberation war, BRAC began its journey in Bangladesh with a focus on rehabilitation before shifting to a more long-term, sustainable community development approach. The organization’s leadership soon realized that, within the existing deeply patriarchal structure, working with the community as a whole was unlikely to address women’s needs or harness their potential as agents of change. Consequently, BRAC started to focus on women as a distinct subgroup, which eventually became one of its key constituencies.
After half a century, the organization still considers women empowerment and gender equality as central to its work. However, BRAC’s overarching strategies for women empowerment have shifted significantly over the years—from an emphasis on collective empowerment and social transformation to an approach built on women’s individual agency.
In the 1970s, BRAC’s approach was rooted in the Freirean concept of “conscientization”— the idea that oppressed groups must become critically aware of their social reality in order to transform it. Women were one such group, whom the organization saw as a “key instrument for change,” stressing their roles not only in improving their family’s positions but also in challenging oppressive social norms. BRAC ensured women’s inclusion in Village Organizations (VOs)—the primary vehicle of BRAC’s community empowerment and service delivery—and actively involved them in shaping program agendas. Crucially, BRAC, through these collective structures, created awareness and motivated the women to claim their rights by pressuring local authorities.
The 1974 famine further solidified the criticality of women in BRAC’s development agenda. As droves of men left famine-stricken villages in search of work, women were left to fend not just for themselves but also for their children and the elderly. The famine laid bare the extreme vulnerability of rural poor women, while simultaneously demonstrating their unmatched resilience and resourcefulness. Women’s collective empowerment was well-aligned with these organizational thinkings.
However, starting from the 1980s, BRAC increasingly started to prioritize women’s individual over collective empowerment, paralleling a broader organizational move from social transformation to service delivery, primarily through its Microcredit program. While BRAC still targeted women, it was primarily as service recipients, rather than as a collective force for social transformation. Women’s perceived creditworthiness and better compliance with program requirements significantly contributed to program’s success.
The authors argue that this de-emphasis on women’s collective empowerment was a result of the structural changes in the development sector itself. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s motivated donors to advocate for rolling back state interventions and promote NGO-led service delivery. Consequently, NGOs like BRAC started receiving significant donor funding for service delivery. The influence of neoliberalism also brought a push for efficiency, anti-poverty economic agenda, and a focus on individual agency. Moreover, a growing donor “fascination with numbers” meant that collective empowerment programs were further deprioritized because their impacts were hard to quantify using standard development indicators.
In line with donor priorities, BRAC was incentivized to develop efficient, service-focused programs that could be scaled up rapidly. Thus, using structures like VOs as a means of direct service delivery made more rational sense than using them as a force for fundamental social change, which was neither easily scalable nor measurable.
To successfully run efficient, scalable poverty alleviation programs, BRAC also often had to navigate and negotiate within the existing gender power structures. Directly challenging these structures would have been disruptive to achieving program goals. For example, staff often sought permission from the husband before giving out a loan to a woman.
To be fair, BRAC never completely abandoned its collective empowerment agenda. In the 1990s, the organization established village-based women’s forums, called the Polli Samaj, to develop women’s leadership so they could effectively advocate for social justice. However, instead of challenging the existing power structure, the Polli Samaj approach was to work in collaboration with the rural elites to remain apolitical. The effectiveness of Polli Samaj is debatable, and sometimes, the authors argue, it even reinforced the power structure. Over time, this program lost ground due to further shifts in donor funding away from collective approaches and doubling down on efficiency.
A more recent attempt at collective empowerment is BRAC’s Urban Development Program (UDP), which aims to integrate community organizations, mobilization, and women’s empowerment. The authors observe that even here, women are often instrumentalized, used, for example, to get easier household access. They also indicate that tensions arise between men and women over leadership positions, and in these cases, BRAC often makes pragmatic compromises with patriarchal norms.
Overall, NGO-led initiatives on collective empowerment of women, including those of BRAC, have gradually declined over time. While this has allowed BRAC to efficiently deliver essential services to millions of poor, including women, it raises questions about the extent to which the economic prosperity gained through its interventions has contributed to addressing repressive power structures, which is often the hope. With BRAC’s declining dependence on donor funding, the authors urge the organization to reevaluate the trade-off between programmatic efficiency and long-term social transformation.
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