Late last year, the development world said goodbye to one of our own – Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. Abed was the founder of the largest NGO in the world – BRAC (originally known as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee).

Abed was born in Bangladesh, studying in Glasgow and London, before returning to Bangladesh to work at Pakistan Shell Oil. Under another set of circumstances, Abed might have led a successful career in business. But, in 1970, a cyclone hit the coast of the country and 300,000 people were killed.

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Abed was changed forever. He quickly started an organization with friends to help those most harmed and help to rebuild parts of the country, but had to flee to London during the 1971 Liberation War. After the war, Abed returned to Bangladesh along with 10 million refugees and realized that these individuals needed support to reintegrate into life in the new Bangladesh. And so he used his own money to set up the organization we know as BRAC.

BRAC’s earliest work focused on improving the lives of girls and young women – well before the movement to “let girls learn”. BRAC’s rehydration programs taught some 14 million mothers how to make an oral rehydration solution out of salt, sugar and water, important medicine for children with diarrhea. The result was a reduction in children mortality from 25% to 4%. BRAC’s programs grew into education and the organization supported 34,000 schools. And BRAC was one of the earliest proponents of microfinance, providing four billion dollars in microfinance annually. Abed’s work started a legendary organization – you cannot work in this space without at some point being in awe of the scale and progress that BRAC has made in Bangladesh.

One of the earliest quotes I read of Abed’s was: “Small is beautiful, but scale is necessary”.

This rings true and inspires today, as Impact Network embarks on a path to reach the largest number of students ever in its history. May we do so in his shadows, in his footprints, and in his memory.

- Reshma