Robin Davies interviews Asif Saleh, the Executive Director of BRAC, one of the world’s largest and most influential non-governmental organisations. Asif reflects on BRAC’s remarkable evolution from a post-war relief organisation in Bangladesh to a global leader in tackling poverty, health, education and social innovation. Under his leadership, BRAC has identified and addressed emerging challenges such as urban poverty, youth unemployment and climate adaptation.
In this episode of Devpolicy Talks, Robin Davies interviews Asif Saleh, the Executive Director of BRAC, one of the world’s largest and most influential non-governmental organisations. Asif reflects on BRAC’s remarkable evolution from a post-war relief organisation in Bangladesh to a global leader in tackling poverty, health, education and social innovation. Under his leadership, BRAC has identified and addressed emerging challenges such as urban poverty, youth unemployment and climate adaptation.
Asif begins by recounting BRAC’s origins in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971. Initially focused on refugee rehabilitation, the organisation quickly pivoted to long-term development solutions, recognising the multidimensional nature of poverty. Over the years, BRAC has pioneered scalable models in microfinance, health care, education, and social enterprises. It has also developed a unique ecosystem that integrates livelihood programs with market connections through its social enterprises, including a dairy company and a rural artisan fashion brand.
The conversation explores Asif’s personal journey from investment banking at Goldman Sachs to development leadership at BRAC. He describes how his work with human rights advocacy among Bangladeshi diaspora communities inspired his transition to development. Since joining BRAC in 2011, Asif has leveraged his private sector expertise to drive innovation within the organisation, launching initiatives like the Social Innovation Lab and programs targeting urban poverty and youth skills development.
Asif discusses BRAC’s current priorities, which reflect the pressing challenges facing Bangladesh today. Rapid urbanisation, climate-induced migration, and underemployment among young people are at the forefront of BRAC’s agenda. He highlights how climate adaptation is intertwined with poverty alleviation, as many displaced individuals come from Bangladesh’s poorest regions. BRAC is working to develop scalable solutions that enable vulnerable populations to remain in their communities while building resilience against climate shocks.
The interview also touches on political changes in Bangladesh and their impact on BRAC’s operations. Asif explains how the organisation navigates political transitions while maintaining partnerships with governments to deliver essential services. He emphasises the importance of fostering collaboration between civil society, government, and the private sector to address systemic challenges.
A key focus of the discussion is BRAC’s globally acclaimed Graduation Model for poverty reduction. This two-year program targets ultra-poor households with asset transfers, coaching, and skill-building to help them achieve sustainable livelihoods. Asif explains how this model has been rigorously tested and adapted across diverse contexts worldwide, becoming a gold standard for addressing extreme poverty.
Looking ahead, Asif outlines BRAC’s strategic vision for addressing future challenges. The organisation aims to scale its Graduation Model globally while reimagining microfinance for a digital age and expanding initiatives in climate adaptation and youth employment. He underscores the need for innovative partnerships that leverage public and private sector strengths to tackle complex development issues.
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Asif Saleh
BRAC is like a big social innovation lab with a lot of experiments going on to solve social challenges, both current and emerging. What started as livelihood work led to financial inclusion in microfinance, then early work in adult education. So over time, looking at health challenges, education challenges, and coming up with scalable solutions or models, led BRAC to become such a massive organization with very large scale programs. In a way, it's like almost a ladder and also an ecosystem. We have a tagline called 'always a way'. So whatever solutions you're looking for, you just have to keep at it and just do it.
Acknowledgement of Country
We wish to acknowledge the indigenous people of Australia, the wider Asia, Pacific region and other parts of the world, and express our respect for their traditional knowledge and practices, which stem from a deep connection to the lands and waters they've inhabited for millennia.
Intro
Welcome to Devpolicy Talks, the podcast of the Development Policy Centre. We’re part of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra.
I’m Robin Davies.
This is our twelfth season, and we’re bringing you a mix of interviews, event recordings, and in-depth features on the topics we research at the Centre – including Australia’s overseas aid, development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, and broader regional and global development issues.
In this episode, I speak with Asif Saleh, Executive Director of BRAC, one of the world’s largest and most influential non-governmental organisations. Founded in Bangladesh in 1972, BRAC has grown into a global leader in poverty reduction, education, health care and social innovation. Under Asif’s leadership since 2019, BRAC has tackled emerging challenges such as urban poverty, youth unemployment and climate adaptation while continuing its pioneering work in microfinance and its globally recognised graduation approach to poverty alleviation.
Asif’s own journey is remarkable. Before joining BRAC in 2011, he spent over a decade in investment banking with Goldman Sachs and led initiatives addressing human rights abuses among Bangladeshi diaspora communities. His transition from finance to development has shaped his vision for BRAC as a “social conglomerate” that combines innovation with scale to address some of the most pressing challenges facing Bangladesh and other developing countries.
In this wide-ranging interview, Asif reflects on BRAC’s evolution from a post-war relief organisation to a global leader in development innovation. He discusses how BRAC is addressing climate-induced displacement, creating job opportunities for young people, and rethinking microfinance for a digital age. Asif also shares insights into navigating political upheaval in Bangladesh and his vision for BRAC’s future as it adapts to a rapidly changing world.
Introduction
Asif Saleh 2:17
I'm Asif Saleh. I'm the executive director of BRAC. I've been with BRAC for almost 14 years now, and our founder said when I joined BRAC that it's going to be a place where you can do a lot of things if you want to do things, or it can be a place where you can not do anything at all. So it's your choice how you're going to make this place and how you're going to use this space. So for the last 14 years, I've tried to use this platform to achieve a lot of the dreams that I had in terms of solving some of the social challenges. So yeah, this journey continues.
BRAC's history and structure
Robin Davies 3:06
Can you tell me a little bit about the history of BRAC and its founder? It's a very unusual organization. It's a non-government organization, but it operates at such a scale and provides such a range of services that it's almost quasi-governmental in some ways.
Asif Saleh 3:26
Yeah, I mean, the way we look at it, it's like a big social innovation lab. There's a lot of experiments going on, but at the same time, to solve social challenges, both current and emerging social challenges. So it's, yeah, I mean, the history, if you think about it, as you said, there is a, it's a bit quite a unique organization. But it didn't start as a unique organization. It started as an organization to support the rehabilitation work of refugees who returned to Bangladesh right after the War of Independence in 1971 but as sooner or later, the organization realized that relief is a very short term thing, and over time, people look for long term livelihood opportunities. So it pivoted to focus on providing livelihood options and I think over time, as we know now, that poverty is quite comprehensive and multi-dimensional. And so as you start solving for one problem, you see there are other things that you need to solve for as well.
So BRAC, in its culture and DNA, has this constant hunger for asking the fundamental question that, are we being able to achieve what we started with, the ambition that we started with, and continuously pivot and iterate as you go along. So what started as livelihood work led to starting off financial inclusion in microfinance. Then that led to some early work or adult education. Then over time, we saw that Bangladesh required a lot of focus on family planning, but when you started asking the parents that in terms of why they do not do family planning, they said, "We don't know how many of our children would survive, and that's why we don't do any family planning." And so then the focus went on to reducing child mortality, and addressing the fundamental causes of child mortality. So then there's a massive health intervention that happened at scale.
So over time, kind of looking at health challenges, education challenges, and coming up with scalable solutions or models, led BRAC to become such a massive organization with very large scale programs on health, education, microfinance and skills development and many other things. And then, not only that, at the early days of Bangladesh, we didn't really have a strong private sector so, but BRAC, very early days, realized that ultimately, if you want to make some of these livelihood options sustainable and scaled, then you need to connect them to a market.
So lot of the social enterprises that BRAC started, the earlier genesis was that it was a means to connect the products that people were generating as part of the livelihood opportunities to connect to the market. And so then we now have 10 very large social enterprises, including one of the largest lifestyle fashion brand, which is all rural artisan made products, connecting about 70,000 artisans across from rural Bangladesh. We have BRAC Dairy, which is also a second largest dairy production company in the country. Then we have the seeds. It's the largest and most sought after seeds producer for the farmers. And it also has a number of investments that we have, the BRAC Bank, which is an investment to support SMEs, who people who graduated from microfinance to the next level.
So in a way, you can think about it, it's like almost a ladder and also an ecosystem. At the same time, we have a tagline called "always a way". So that means that whatever solutions you're looking for, you just have to keep at it and just do it. So that resulted into BRAC being such a large social conglomerate.
Personal journey from investment banking to BRAC
Robin Davies 8:35
And in fact, your own background was in investment banking, originally, before you joined BRAC in 2011 with Goldman Sachs, if I'm correct, yes. So what made you jump from that kind of milieu, into BRAC, into non-government work?
Asif Saleh 8:55
Yeah, that's very interesting journey that I took. But in a way, it didn't, it's like one of those things when you connect back the dots, it makes sense, but when you were living through it, you were not sure that how it will end up. I had a very traditional career where I grew up in Bangladesh, but then I went to the United States to study, and I studied computer science, and then again, you know, just living that American dream, I got a well-paid job, going through that process of green card, American home and all of that.
But then something was missing in my life, and I started a charity myself, particularly working with the diaspora of Bangladesh to focus on an issue which was very much close to my heart, but at the same time very much needed is supporting human rights abuse survivors to help them rehabilitate and at the same time raise awareness on those issues. And that led me and that organization that I started kind of grew quite organically. It was purely voluntary, but that gave me a lot of gratification in terms of the other things that I wanted in my life, beyond just making my own sort of livelihood.
And so the organization grew. My involvement grew. I started coming to Bangladesh more often, and I was looking for opportunities in terms of returning back to Bangladesh and at the end of 2009 I decided to jump after spending almost 18 years in the West, and 12 of them in Goldman Sachs. I decided that I'll try it out, and I returned to Bangladesh and switched my sector, except I didn't know who's going to hire me, but I started my own initiative in Bangladesh, which I tried for about a year, but then I had to go back to employment, and I worked for UN for about a year and a half, but I didn't enjoy that experience.
Then I got a call from the founder of the organization, who said that if you really want to understand development, then you got to get your hands dirty. You cannot just write policy papers. It is useless. No one's going to read that paper. So, and that's when I joined BRAC, and it just completely changed my life and perception about development, and got a very unique vantage point, if I can say that, to look at because BRAC is so huge, and it gives you such a huge platform that you can also get to see it up front, be able to be with the community, to be able to look at social challenges, from a very broad lens.
I think the interesting thing about the organization is that if you have good ideas, you can push for it, and then you can get that started, because it also has the economic independence. It doesn't have to wait for a donor to convince a donor always. So as part of that, I started Social Innovation Lab at BRAC. I started couple of new programs on urban poverty and skills development for young people, and also incubated some of the new initiatives and couple of enterprises as well. So yeah, that's kind of like the journey but I could transfer a lot of my private sector skill sets as well, because BRAC is very ambitious as an organization as well, in terms of solving the social problems and scaling their solutions as well. So in a way, and also I sit on many boards in terms of where BRAC has investments. So both my technology and finance experience comes really handy. So I think it's quite unique that way, that it's not just a very traditional NGO. I don't know what's the right term to explain BRAC but we started using the term social conglomerate now, more and more.
BRAC's current priorities
Robin Davies 13:49
And the organization's priorities have sort of gravitated towards urban poverty, youth skills development, climate change. I understand. How have you arrived at those sort of priorities?
Asif Saleh 14:05
Well, those are the biggest emerging challenges for both Bangladesh and many of these countries where we work in Africa as well. Some of the early interventions of BRAC had massive scale, as you mentioned. I mean, we ran 64,000 schools in Bangladesh. At one point when we took our reducing child mortality campaign, we actually went to every single household in Bangladesh to teach mothers how to make oral rehydration solution. So such massive scale has always been very important to solve those problems that were prevalent in the 80s and 90s.
If you look at Bangladesh in 2025 with a massive young population, and with a very fast urbanization that is happening, you realize that many of these are related to whether it's people moving because they're losing their land because of climate change. To the cities, there's aspirational migration happening, but the cities are not planned to take on so many of these people. So we're seeing urbanization of poverty. BRAC did very well in terms of tackling the challenges of rural poverty in Bangladesh and many other parts of the world, but urban poverty is far more complex. So that's one area we are trying to work with local governments and better planning climate adaptation.
Again, Bangladesh is the seventh most vulnerable country in terms of climate change. And as I was mentioning, not only displacement is happening because of land erosion, but you have the slow onset disasters, which not a lot of people pay attention to, the salinity creeping in, losing access to drinking water, losing access to land where you can cultivate. So you need to completely rethink how development is done in terms of climate adaptation and climate adaptation poverty, those are very interlinked. Most of the people who are moving are coming from the poorest districts of Bangladesh and for us, it's extremely important that people can—people typically do not want to move, unless they have to.
So we are looking to kind of solve that issue. People don't want to move, but what makes them move? Where can we address those issues that are making them move and wherever they are, whether it's in the coastal parts of Bangladesh or a drought-prone area where the rain has become very erratic, can we provide those essential services and reduce their risk so that they can stay where they are and not only survive, but thrive as well. So it's a huge amount of people. It's almost 190 million people in a very small country, densely populated and if you're losing 17% of your land, you need to figure out some solutions that can be scaled very quickly.
Political changes and impact on BRAC
Robin Davies 17:45
Of course, Bangladesh has been through an extended period of political upheaval. It's currently under an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus. How has that affected BRAC? Have you had to modify your strategy as a result of these changes?
Asif Saleh 18:09
Well, I mean, yeah, BRAC doesn't work in an island. So obviously the country has seen a huge amount of violence in a short amount of time. That is very concerning. In many ways, our work has been affected, but because of the scale that we work, we always have to work closely with the government, whether it's in health care, education and all of these areas we work with, regardless of which government is in power, right?
So I think from a perspective of changes, I mean, we are continuing our work with the interim government. There is opportunity to fundamentally make some reforms where those windows were not open. That window has opened in terms of looking at some issues very closely, particularly looking at electoral reform, looking at how the government should work for the citizens. So there's a civil service reform initiative that is ongoing, and also a number of other in terms of looking at corruption as a whole.
So now the Dr. Yunus interim government had few commissions looking at these issues, and they have submitted their report, which now there's a process of building consensus among political parties to see which of them can be implemented quickly. So all that process is ongoing, but there is also that other important thing of holding a neutral, fair and free election that is ongoing, so that election seems to be likely to be taking place by end of this year. So I think that's also very important that elected government comes to power, takes control of the situation, because also, interim government, without its good intention, is still very interim. It doesn't or is not able to take long term decisions.
So I think, but our economy as which is like the biggest concern right now, in terms of because of the political instability, and also the uncertainty and higher risk, and also the law and order situation and the very weakened banking sector, there has been challenges in terms of getting both local and international investment.
Bangladesh has a very young population. Almost 50% of the population is under the age of 30. There's a huge amount of under employment and also unemployment and here, many of the graduates actually don't find jobs. So that is the biggest concern at this point, how do you find employment for people, and particularly for young, educated people, and so that's where we are putting all our focus.
Using the massive ecosystem that we have, what are the areas where new jobs can be created? We have been talking about jobless growth for the longest time, but looking at agriculture as a growth area, looking at small businesses, looking at e-commerce, digital jobs, green jobs. In the past, BRAC did a lot of sectoral development, created ecosystem in areas where new job opportunities could be created. So we are really looking at what are those areas now, in 2025 where we can work with our financing, with our kind of linkage with other partners.
So I would say Bangladesh is at extremely crossroad. It had a crossroad. Bangladesh is also graduating to a middle income country, which will reduce a lot of the benefits it gets as a LDC. So in many ways, Bangladesh needs all the support now, both the political and also economical support. But at the same time, it's going through all of these challenges, both economical, climate related and political. So I think for the next two, three years, it's going to be enormously important for the global community to stand next to Bangladesh and support its change process, and also to help the economy get back into shape, because this is important for the regional stability, security for the world as a whole, because if you don't have jobs, you don't have food on the table, that's a recipe for social unrest and challenges.
Government and NGO roles in Bangladesh
Robin Davies 23:22
Now it was sometimes said of the Sheikh Hasina government and earlier governments that there was an excessive reliance on the non-government organizations to provide the sort of services that are generally provided by government itself, that there was more institutional capacity in the non-government sector than there was in the government sector. It seems to me, your strategy is correcting for that to some extent; you are moving much more towards private sector engagement. Is that a conscious choice? Do you feel that in the past, there was too much reliance on non-government organizations for service delivery in Bangladesh?
Asif Saleh 24:09
Well, I mean the dependency, I think it's a bit over-emphasized. I don't think even when BRAC ran 64,000 schools, it still catered for about seven to 8% of the school going children in the primary level, 92 to 93% still were going to national schools. But in some of the major issues, NGOs brought in some big cultural shifts, getting women out in the workforce, in family planning, getting girls education done at scale and changing people's behavior and perception about certain of these issues, but in service delivery, government still played a lead role.
We tried to play complementary role, and we always tried to do that, and also during the previous regime, we figured that ultimately change will come when the national system changes, the state system changes. So we try to work with that government in terms of training the teachers, linking our community health care workers with the primary health care system. But I think the previous regime also had a very, I would say it was more statist. I think it was seen that only the state should provide those services. Less welcoming to civil society organization.
But I think looking ahead, I don't think that just the government providing the solution is the answer. I think there needs to—government is not, like it or not, not doing a very good job in terms of delivering for the people. So education system is in a mess. Healthcare is not that great. So if you need to make fundamental shifts, you need to get the best from all these places. Bangladesh is fortunate to have such a large social sector and private sector has also come up. So how do you get them engaged in this process? So ultimately, the service delivery improves and the citizen benefits. I think that's where the solutions lie, not by giving everything away to state.
The “Graduation” approach to poverty reduction
Robin Davies 26:56
I wanted to ask you about the graduation approach to poverty reduction, which was introduced by BRAC and it's been adopted globally. Can you describe what it is and how it works?
Asif Saleh 27:08
Yeah, I mean, the graduation model is definitely our flagship program, the most successful model, I would say, and most rigorously researched and independent evidence generated in this model. I mean, essentially, this is targeting the group that microfinance doesn't reach.
So if you think about a ladder for development, where microfinance, the people who get that are at the bottom of the ladder. You're talking about a group which are not in the ladder, and they need to graduate to get into that ladder. So they are not even people who get the minimum that is required to be considered extreme poor, which is about dollar 1.95 income a day. So typically, the people we target, get about half of that. Oftentimes, these are women who have been left behind by their husband or widowed, with three children, got married off early and they are so invisible that they don't even have any asset.
So what we do is, this program is targeted for them, so it is a form of a social protection. But what we call it a social protection plus plus, because it's a two year program where the fundamental understanding is that these people need some hand holding. These people need some level of asset to start with, and also building of their own inner confidence that they can change their own lives.
So this two year intervention starts with identifying who these individuals are, and these are often done by the villagers, and then we look at their overall household situation. How many of them, again, looking at poverty in a very multi-dimensional lens like do—it's not just about income poverty. Do their children go to school? Do they have a proper latrine? What is their nutritional intake? Do they have savings? Do they have multiple sources of income? So many of these indicators are looked at, and then every week a social service person comes and talks to this woman and gives them confidence, and coaching, and also they get an asset. Oftentimes, it's a cow or a piece of land or depending on the rural, local context.
How to use this asset to make it, to grow this asset, to give them a financial plan, give them a path, and then over two years, we have seen that once they look at all these other indicators, in terms of savings, in terms of resilience, in terms of their all the—there are about nine indicators. Their latrines, their children's education, nutritional intake, all of this. If they tick all these boxes, then we say that they have graduated to that next level. They have gotten into that ladder, and now they can self-sustain.
So this graduation model, in 2015 the first research came out in terms of looking at their transportability. This was tested in six other very different contexts, in very different continents. And then there was a randomized control trial done. And this was done by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who got the Nobel Prize for this research and they showed that it is a gold standard model in terms of how effective it was in all these different contexts. So then there was a huge, massive interest in this model itself.
And then BRAC created a group of people who now indirectly works with the government to incorporate this learning in the social protection system. Because what we tell the governments is that you can provide allowances for years and years indefinitely, or you can make a two year investment in human capacity so that they become a productive player in the local economy and it's much, far more dignified.
And our research has shown that, LSE has done a research in terms of looking at the graduates after nine years and over 80% of them actually has shown that not only they did not regress, they actually have gone from strength to strength in terms of making their lives even better from where they were. So our goal is to now scale this model as much as possible, through governments, through large organizations, and we are providing this service now.
The largest intervention in terms of largest scale graduation model is not in Bangladesh anymore by BRAC. It's actually have been done by the state government of Bihar in India through their program called known as Jeevika. And now there are five other states in India that's also doing the same thing. So it's now being replicated in 100 different countries, different contexts, in climate context, in urban context. Different models, different organizations are doing this. So I think that's how it should be in development that people don't need to reinvent wheels. People need to ensure that the wheels are fit for their car. So that's why we focus on developing models that the rest of the world can take.
The Bridge Returnship Program
Robin Davies 33:21
And quite recently, you've launched a new program, the bridge returnship program, which focuses on mid-career women. What's the problem that that is seeking to address?
Asif Saleh 33:34
So see, BRAC has always been very focused on gender equality. All of our intervention focused on putting women as the best managers of poverty. And also, our founder used to say, this is an unfinished agenda and, of course, charity begins at home, right? In a way that you need to also, continuously look at what you can do in your own organization.
And one thing we observed is that Bangladesh now has more women, more girls in school than boys, but when you look at workplace, the number drops staggeringly in terms of women's participation in the formal work, and both in formal and formal workspace and one of the big reasons in the particularly in the urban context, is we see that once women begin to grow their family, they have a break in their career, and they take a few years off and they have a very difficult time in getting back into the workplace, because there was a break in their CV. So by that time, they sometimes lose their confidence. Everybody asks, "What about the break?"
So this returnship is an opportunity for those women who wanted to come back, they took a career break because of family reasons, and this gives them a space to work for six months and brush up their skill sets again, get back into a professional environment and get their confidence back up, and then also for us to see what are the good skills out there, and can we do this affirmative action and at the same time kind of identify some good talent? So it should be a win-win proposition for both parties. And we want to make it a model where other organizations can do the same. Because I think it's very important that you don't just talk about gender equality, but you actually show how it can be done in your own organization.
Impact of US foreign aid freeze
Robin Davies 35:58
One of the issues of the moment is the freeze on US foreign assistance, the possible closure of USAID, how is this affecting BRAC? How dependent is BRAC on US funding for some of its operations?
Asif Saleh 36:19
See, we have US—the US government has been funding some of the largest humanitarian operations, and, of course, the biggest kind of writer of checks when it comes to both humanitarian and development. So in a way, directly and through other partners, we are affected in Bangladesh.
You know that the largest refugee camp of the Rohingyas, where 40% of the support came from the US government and BRAC, is the largest civil society responder over there. So we are very worried about that operation. In fact, how that's going to go on? Of course, this is a review process ongoing. I really hope that we pass through that review, because it's very important that there are over a million people living in a very densely populated area where extreme sensitivity, both in terms of security and other economic reasons and regional reasons, are there. So this aid is extremely important for humanitarian purposes.
The other area, I would say, is that you know that there was a shift on USAID over the last few years to do more localization. I mean, 94% of the aid did not go to local organization. And we in Bangladesh, we in partnership with USAID, we started this model where we managed a fund, for local, smaller civil society organizations, and at the same time, build their capacity so that they could directly over time, get the funding from USAID, so that one is also suspended right now, and I think the effect more than on BRAC is going to be on those other civil society organizations which are often quite smaller, and they had a ray of hope in a climate where aids are becoming extremely rare, more and more rare.
So my worry is that many smaller civil society organizations also dependent indirectly on USAID money as well, in a politically charged environment where there is less and less space for civil society actors globally, in different countries, I worry about the future, because not many of them have diversified portfolio financial model like BRAC, where we are not dependent on any single donor, per se, but we have different sources of earning.
So I worry, but at the same time, I think it's an opportunity to fundamentally look at aid architecture as a whole. It's an opportunity to identify in terms of how to do more aid effectiveness in terms of more efficiently and cost effectively, how to do more with less. We always talked about disruption, disruption needed in this sector as a whole. Of course, not this kind, but I think since this has happened, all of us can step back and look at what we can do differently, and how to kind of do development differently, so that it's more homegrown, it's more long term, it's more community led.
And also, just looking at efficiency and effectiveness in general, of what has worked in the past well and what has not worked. And that needs to be a very honest conversation, where we will need to admit our failure as a sector, without thinking about self-preservation, because ultimately, it's not really about keeping the sector alive, it's more about the intention of the sector, which is like the going money, the money needs to go to the ground to solve real social problems. And there are plenty of them, right? So ultimately, we need to look at that, if the aid money is effective in actually solving people's problem at scale.
Future direction for BRAC
Robin Davies 41:10
If I can just finish with a question about the future, I know your organization's current strategic framework, I think ends this year. So you're thinking, what next at a time of, as we said, upheaval in Bangladesh and upheaval globally as a result of what's happening in the United States. Where do you see the organization going for the next, sort of three to five years?
Asif Saleh 41:40
Our strategy cycle is ending. We have onboarded a new strategy process, and Australian government has been a massive strategic partner in this process. So we are very grateful to Australia, Australian people, for supporting BRAC with core strategic funding over the last almost 13 years and as we were talking about aid effectiveness, there are some fantastic examples of how this money was used in terms of both. I mean money going far longer, in terms of bringing in long term changes. I mean just one fact that there have been 2 million ultra poor households have graduated because of this intervention. And every dollar coming from Australia, it actually led to almost four dollars of additional resources for BRAC as well. And we have done a cost effectiveness analysis, where we have seen that between UK Government and Australian government, they have put in about $350 million over the last period of 13 years and that amount resulted to a sort of ROI of almost two and a half billion dollars in terms of specific methodology in terms of what we calculated on this.
But looking ahead now, I think, in a way, I've been telling my colleagues that give me one normal year, because since COVID, there hasn't been a normal year anymore, and probably that's the new normal as well that doing a five year strategy is a luxury, because you don't even know what's going to happen in two to three years.
So one of the key things is obviously looking at these emerging challenges and how to solve this at scale, poverty focus is going to continue. We're going to try to get the graduation model out there as much as possible with different governments. We are launching a big, comprehensive initiative on climate adaptation. And again, we are not thinking too much on aid dependency. Of course, aid needs to come, but we are thinking about designing models which more depends on self-sufficiency, but aid will need to come as well, particularly in climate adaptation case and eradicating of ultra poverty as a whole.
But we are looking at microfinance in a different way. I mean, microfinance has been in this sector for a while now, but particularly, I think it's time to reimagine the sector as not just a financial service provider, but different types of financial services, like insurance and other things that can be brought in. The digitization is happening in this space as well. So bringing in more innovations to have more and more financial services available for people who do not get any services from the bank, so that they can reduce their risks in terms of these extreme volatility from climate that is coming in, looking at agriculture in a fundamentally different way with more digital technology coming in, collectivization of farmers as a whole.
So we are designing a big bet program around climate adaptation, which addresses all of these issues in terms of why people are forced to migrate, and, of course, youth, livelihood and jobs, right? So where can new sectors be created? Where are the linkages with the market that can be created? And end of the day, no NGO can, or no social civil society organization can solve such massive problems. So it's really about designing innovative models that can be incorporated by the government or in partnership.
So ultimately, we have to work with the states to improve the state system, the national system as a whole, but bringing in the best of private sector, best of social sector, and linking it with the government sector to make it more efficient, that's how we will be able to operate in this world where you probably can say goodbye to the big scale funding that we used to have, particularly from bilaterals, but looking at also newer sources of funding, we have probably highest amount of wealth generation that has happened in generations. So we need more philanthropy. We need more foundations.
Because in a world with already so much uncertainty, again with so much inequality as well, it's not going to be a very cohesive world, and nothing is going to just stay isolated in one country. It's going to spread. So I think sustainable development will lead to sustainable peace. So whether there is America first, whether it's Australia or other countries, I think it's very important to have a bit more longer term view that what keeps their country safe is going to be when people are living cohesively in their own society. I think that's very important and I think we need to tell the story of development a bit differently going forward as a sector.
Robin Davies 47:23
Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, and all the best for the rocky years ahead.
Asif Saleh 47:30
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.