Scott MacMillan - Hope Over Fate: Fazle Hasan Abed and the Science of Ending Global Poverty

D uring the years-long process of researching and writing this book, Nawrin Nujhat proved to be more than a translator, fixer, pep-talker, and traveling companion. On our journeys through the backroads, rivers, and traffic jams of Bangladeshincluding an epic road trip from Rowmari in the north to Patuakhali in the southI gained a better and more sensory understanding of the country. Only someone with Nawrins sensibility would point out that a passing market town smells like a mix of fish and sawdust. I also learned from Nawrin of the sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine (an aroma reminiscent of sorrow, according to the poets) and the most famous desserts of each city and district.

I am indebted to Rachel Kabir, the head of the chairpersons office at BRAC headquarters in Bangladesh, for numerous edits and proofreads, and also for opening a window into Bangladeshi language and customs, often over lunches and late-evening suppers on the nineteenth floor of the BRAC Center. I am grateful to many others who have ridden those elevators, including Shajedur Rahman Rokon, for memories and connections formed during his many years at BRAC; Shararat Islam, for translation and other invaluable help during my first trip to Sulla in 2015; the staff of Shuruchi, the best restaurant in the world; Rakib Avi; and many other colleagues who have turned into friends.

Closer to home, I feel honored to have worked alongside amazing people at BRAC USA (both versions 1.0 and 2.0) over the past ten years. They are too numerous to name here, though I am especially grateful to my immediate supervisors, Donella Rapier and Dan Stoner, for their support in pushing this project through to the end and to Susan Davis for being a champion in its early stages. Thanks, also, to Doris Prodanovic and Ally Feldman for volunteer transcribing and note taking.

Emma Riley, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, did me the enormous favor of visiting the Bodleian Library to dig through the Oxfam archives, unearthing old emails that tell the story of the scuttled BRAC-Oxfam merger from the Oxfam side. Collette Chabbott provided guidance for the chapter on the BRAC education program based on research for her book, Institutionalizing Health and Education for All: Global Goals, Innovations, and Scaling Up (2015). Stephen Smith, chair of the Department of Economics and professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University, deserves thanks just for letting me bounce ideas off him while walking along the Potomac. Martha Alter Chen, who appears many times as a supporting character in the BRAC story (and serves as chair of the BRAC Global Board, as of 2022), opened up her archive of old photos. Her book A Quiet Revolution: Women in Transition in Rural Bangladesh (1983) is a valuable portrait of the early years of BRAC. I am also indebted to the scholarly work of the late Catherine Lovell, author of Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: The BRAC Strategy (1992). My friend Jen Sacks gave creative input at the proposal stage, while June Thomas and Keith Miller offered valuable copyediting suggestions.

I am grateful for the reflections of the many people I interviewed for this book. Cole Dodge was especially helpful on nearly all aspects of the BRAC story, answering question after question. Manzoor Hasan helped fill in gaps in the Hasan family story. David Nalin reviewed in detail, and Richard Cash offered comments on the manuscript in its entirety, not just the chapters that included him. Others added shape and color to the narrative, even though not all could be credited in the text. In addition to those whom I have quoted directly, these include Lady Syeda Sarwat Abed, Tapan Kumar Acharjee, Kaosar Afsana, Faruque Ahmed, Jalaluddin Ahmed, Kutubuddin Ahmed, the late Moudud Ahmed, Ghulam Fatema Ahsan (Anu), Shamma Alam, Lynn Bickley, Viquar Chamoun, Lincoln Chen, Najma Hafeez, Anadil (Dilly) Hossain, Ariful Islam, Safiqul Islam, Sirajul Islam, Andrew Jenkins, S. N. Kairy, Sudhir Nath, Rashida Parveen, Kamal Quadir, Bidhubhusan Roy, Reeta Roy (president and CEO of the Mastercard Foundation), Simone Sultana, Sabina Yasmin, and Hossain Zillur Rahman.

George Greenfield of CreativeWell, my agent, deserves a massive amount of credit for agreeing to represent an unknown author writing a book about a subject whom (unfortunately) most people have never heard of. The same goes for Jon Sisk of Rowman & Littlefield, the publisher, for finally bringing Abeds story to the world.

Thank you to my parents, Doug and Janet MacMillan, for your incredible support over the years, including helping care for Isabella when I had to fly to Bangladesh at a moments notice. My mother deserves extra credit for proofreading this entire manuscript and (of course) finding countless errors. Finally, I think I may have mentioned this project in its earliest stages on my first date with the woman I later married. Thank you for sharing this journey with me, Alex.

T his book relies mainly on original research in the form of interviews with primary source participants and access to BRACs internal archive of reports, proposals, and program documentation. When providing information about BRAC programs, I used both types of sources, sometimes drawing from multiple sources even within a single sentence. I have not provided detailed citations for facts and figures about BRAC programs in the interest of not overburdening the reader with notations. When peoples memories conflicted with the written record, I relied on the written record.

Unless another citation is provided, words that are attributed to people and in quotation marks are usually direct quotations from author interviews. Where these quotes capture historical conversations, the words generally reflect what a person said they recalled hearing or saying. There are a few exceptions, which I hope are obvious from the context: These are where I have dramatized the dialogue for narrative purposes, such as in (the Union Council hearing on the case of the poisoned cow).

I am indebted to the authors of Catalyst: In the Wake of the Great Bhola Cyclone, by the late Cornelia (Candy) Rohde (self-published, 2014), and A Simple Solution: Teaching Millions to Treat Diarrhoea at Home, by A. Mushtaque R. Chowdhury and Richard A. Cash (Dhaka: University Press, 1996). These provided much of the material for , respectively. I am also indebted to Ian Smillie, the author of Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organization Thats Winning the Fight Against Poverty (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2009), which charts the development of BRAC through 2009 from the perspective of a seasoned development professional. Not only was Smillie generous with his personal time in allowing me to interview him and answering subsequent emails, but he also provided me with audio copies of his own interviews for Freedom from Want, including two with the late Aminul Alam, who died before I began researching this book.

Several of my interviewees passed away during the writing of this book, and I feel grateful to have had the privilege of spending time with them in their final years. These include Faruq Choudhury, Nayeemul Hasan, Soraiya (Putul) Hossain, Tajul Islam, Viquar Choudhury, Zakaria Khan, and, of course, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed.

W hen the fox killed Shahida Begums goat, she was so inconsolable it was as though her own child had been murdered. Shahida lives in the panhandle of Bangladeshs far north, where the Brahmaputra pours in from India. In some respects, this is the start of Bangladesh itself, a country created by mighty rivers making their last few hundred miles to the sea, where the land, fertile but often flooded, and its people, constituting more than 2 percent of humanity subsisting on a small patch of the earths surface, exist in a fragile equilibrium. Here in the north, the Brahmaputra is seven miles wide, its murky gray waters flowing around islands called