02:10 thank you very much ladies and gentlemen good evening I thank the Asha foundation for inviting me to be here today and for you to invite me to speak tonight I thought of talking about Bangladesh's struggle with poverty alleviation over the last 40 years when I started brac in 1972 02:40 Bangladesh was was the second poorest country in the world the poorest country was at that time was Upper Volta now called Burkina Faso so we were the bottom of them of the league the poorest country it became independent after war of liberation for about about a year with Pakistan the country was in ruins in the early 1972 when I started practice coming back from India at the time so the initial task was relief and rehabilitation the first one year we are just trying to get people the relief to survive and then the once the relief phase was over one felt that the country was so poor the people were so poor one couldn't really leave them to their own devices one had to commit oneself to long term development 03:49 situation Bangladesh was in at the time:we had seventy-eight percent of our population below the poverty line and the poverty line was also very low in the sense that it was defined as adult finding 21 calories of food literacy rate was less than 25% then mortality rate of children the infant mortality was one hundred and fifty two per thousand; the child ?(under 5) mortality was two hundred and sixty eight per thousand per capita income was less than $70 so that was the situation 04:44 in Bangladesh we didn't produce enough food to feed our people we needed to import about three million tons of rice and our port system didn't have the ability to you to handle all this food... we needed to help Bangladeshis to feed themselves due to our infrastructure problem: schools were destroyed the bridges were destroyed and the country was in ruins. the government was poor and didn't resources -kissinger apparently jokingly said bangladesh was a basket case but I hope it's not our basket case
05:26 so that was the situation so...Bangladesh is last forty years has done remarkably well..Goldman Sachs recently said that Bangla is the next country after the BRICS 05:47 so Bangladesh has made progress and it's growing very fast it's about six percent annually right now and for the last ten years it has been growing more than five percent annually in last six 06:08 obviously if we keep up the growth in this present rate then we will be doing quite well and Goldman Sachs prediction might come true but then what do we did 06:19 so what did we do?that'ss the question that I'm going to try and answer and draw some lessons for other countries which are still poor and are confronting similar kind of problems have we faced5 now if you look at agriculture 06:40 Bangladesh we used to produce 15 million tons of rice paddy rice paddy in nine million hectares of land but over the last 30 years we have lost a million hectares of land in through other things eg infrastructure housing because our population has grown from 70 million we in had 1972 when we started to now 154 million so it's more than doubled but then food production has more than trebled so now producing 50 million tons of food rice production has grown up by more than the population growth rate so we are now --food self-sufficient
so what did we do and why did Africa not do the same thing 07:30 and that's the question that I've been asking to myself the Green Revolution happened in Asia India of Bangladesh Vietnam China everybody took advantage of Green Revolution and idea many of you know who which which institutions were responsible for Green Revolution it was it was all kinds of institutions which were built by Rockefeller/ford Foundation and so on to own Agricultural Research which provided-this spearheaded the Green Revolution in Asia but in Africa it didn't have so when we when thirty years later I copy go to Africa brac goes to Africa it finds that there's no extension service going on there's no high-quality seats going on,there's no irrigation possibilities the government is not investing enough in infrastructure and so on so Africa is completely missed the Green Revolution 08:31 and then of course when I was on the board of IRRI International Rice Research Institute and I happen to be the chairman of the finance in our finance and Audit Committee and elevated five billion dollars to Erie to go to Africa 08:48 just before Agra which was started by Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation on to produce enough research for crop in Africa was created about six years ago six years ago so there's so much so that's one lesson about food production and agriculture where Africa needs to learn from 09:22 extension work in high quality seeds,multiple seed multiplication exchange a extension of good practices that farmers need to learn and proper dosage a fertilizer usage of biomass for so all kinds of things that needs to be done 09:41 one had to learn those and and we are trying to as I'm now working more in more countries in Africa now we are working to implement some of the things that we have learned in our own work in Bangladesh
turning to child survival we had at in 1972 as I said that mortality rate was high very high so we what we did we looked at what kills children infant mortality rate and child mortality rate more than half the children fifty-three percent of the children died from diarrhea and we has ...we all knew that you don't have to a child doesn't have to die 10:34 from the idea oral dehydration all you have to do is to rehydrate the body with saline water it's called oral rehydration solution and then the child doesn't doesn't have to die nobody needs to die from diarrhea Tidy is a self-limiting disease so we decided in 1979 it was the International Year of the child 10:54 looked at the statistics in Bangladesh too many deaths from children and I thought if there's so many deaths mothers are not going to limit family size because they need to have some children surviving in their old age so so there are two things that I wanted to do I wanted to cut down infant mortality for its own sake and secondly to get mothers to limit size of the of the family so we started a program in 1979 to try and go to every household in rural Bangladesh and teach mothers how to make oral rehydration fluid at home so there are 18 million family -households do we have to go and visit so the first 30 dozen household was done and so the program ran for 10 years and we went to every households we paid our workers on the basis of retention of knowledge by the mothers and whether they could make the ordered rehydration for it correctly and we had to test the efficacy of the of the solution the mothers made in the house because we didn't want to make the endanger children if the solution was not right-if there was too much salt it would be dangerous for children so that kind of the so the program went very well and mothers learnt initially of course we had some problem but we solved them ultimately and we had we conducted the program throughout the country last four years of the program Jim grant was then head of UNICEF and then he said to me that can I get can I do something for you ' i said if you can you come and talk to our president to try and get every child immunized he said of course I'll come so he came to my college though we were all he persuaded the president that we should immwhile unize all children 13:00so we did that so so the government and brac isa non-governmental entity but we took half the country -even as all children and the government took the other half and in four years it went the immunization coverage went up 13:15 from 2% to to 76% so that was and then our president was invited to the conference UN conference on children because this that's what he wanted to come true so so Jim planned apparently said that he won't be invited unless you reach 70 percent coverage since there was the incentive anyway so so the child survival we we won that and of course dramatically declined mortality of more than two hundred and sixty four per thousand or under 14:10 of programs we did we try to make programs efficient of course programs were made effective and efficient and of course they're scaled out throughout the nation and that was needed to have an impact on child survival and reducing infant mortality and then of course maternal mortality another problem we are working on it now
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invitations from economistfuture.com - a media project of family foundation norman macrae, cbe, japan order of rising sun
31 years ago our book world class brands, influenced by multiple editors at The Economist, asked whether media can be designed to multiply love and win-wins not hate -to join professional association beieving this in integral to sdgs please contact chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
21 years ago our triole special issue of journal of marketing managent catalogued major brand leadership errors of the 20th centuty, and invited auditing professions to model 80% of a company or networks vale aroung goodwill/dbadwill expoenentials- an opposite maths to 90 days --- we reviewed the journal with harvard's marketing faculty whose head i hsd helped collect big database across 100 countries since 1980-: you may be right but no research funds in usa wpould ever be available for modeling 7 year impacts instead of 90 day extraction- we open sourced our value multiplication to track the lasst 3 yesars of total devaluaqtion of andersen accounting -value multiplication is as simple as if you zero trust with society how ever many trillins your business relationships are woth trillions times 0 does not equal trillion plus nought
to join our professional association of intangibles crisis union - please rsvp chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk traction
13 years ago my father norman macrae's cancer turned terminal- he wanted to understand one last economic miracle- how were the worlds poorest viullage women in banglaseh empowered over 5 0 years to build world leading health and education services for girls and livelihoods even while remaining system trapped on infgrastructure - bangladesh got the short straw geographicaly and timewise in being last top 10 population nation to gain independence from what london's bad capitalism had spun- 15 visits later i had collected 50 years of the bottom u jigsaw pieces which fazle abed passed on to brac university and the 30 college coalition of soros, ban ki moo0n, botstein and all who love seeing stidents find their place in the world - if you contact me with which part of the world's bottom up joigsaw you want to develop i will try and guide you to who to chat to first in the above legacy networks
meanwhile if you are interested in changing the value distributed by every sports model so youth's real heroines get more shatre - see www.economistsports.net or www.economistarts.com
