Innovation at BRAC: Simple solutions that scale

SAN FRANCISCO — When Asif Saleh, the senior director of strategy, communications, and empowerment for BRAC, considers the role that innovation can play at the international development organization, he thinks about how to make sure people can pursue great ideas without having to leave the organization. Specifically, he thinks about Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, who previously worked for BRAC. Ghosh went on to found Bandhan Bank, which started as a microfinance company in India and has since become one of the largest banks in the country. “Here is a regional manager for microfinance within BRAC who had so much potential, but we just didn’t know about it,” Saleh said. “Rather than losing people like him to the outside, can we give them the space to pitch?” The best ideas come from people who are close to the problem, “but because of the organizational hierarchy, it gets lost,” Saleh said in an interview for Devex’s Meet the Innovation Leads series. Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saleh worked as an executive director at Goldman Sachs before working as a policy specialist for the prime minister’s office in Bangladesh and joining BRAC in 2011. The largest development NGO, BRAC is undergoing a transition, moving from being largely focused on implementation to being increasingly open to partnership and collaboration. An example is the Urban Innovation Challenge: Currently, teams are submitting business ideas, and they will receive hands-on training in human-centered design, prototype development, financial projections, and more before going through an investment pitch in April 2019. Saleh leads the Social Innovation Lab at BRAC, which recently launched bracX, an employee innovation platform that encourages intrapreneurship among employees, with the goal of a culture where employees pitch ideas they would like to pursue in the long term. “It’s part of a newer strategy for BRAC: Rather than trying to do everything within the organization, big scale programs, can we create many new players where innovation is coming from them and BRAC is a catalyst — someone who can use its network to help these companies grow?” Saleh said. The leading example of BRAC serving this function is bKash, a company that provides mobile financial services in Bangladesh. BRAC Bank owns 51 percent of bKash, and the remaining 49 percent is divided between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Money in Motion LLC, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and most recently Alibaba. A case study on bKash from the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor says one of the reasons for bKash’s growth is a shared vision for scale among a diverse investor group. Saleh shares the view of Fazle Hasan Abed, BRAC’s founder, who often says “small may be beautiful, but scale is necessary.” bKash did not pilot test, but rather aimed to scale from launch with a learn-as-you-do approach, the CGAP case study explains, and it has emerged as an example of what BRAC means when it says innovation at scale. “Innovation and ideas are plenty. There is no shortage of good ideas and fantastic products. But it doesn’t mean much unless you can scale it, particularly in resource constrained countries like Bangladesh and other countries in the ‘global south,’” Saleh said. “Fancy, expensive, product-driven solutions don’t really scale.” BRAC has been focused on scaling up services such as clean water and sanitation and child care for Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. “When suddenly 700,000 people showed up on our doorstep within four weeks, our biggest crisis was, ‘how can we get these people into bathrooms so a disease outbreak doesn’t happen?’” said Saleh. BRAC had to create 15,000 latrines in a span of a few weeks, meaning it had to come up with a latrine that could be developed and deployed rapidly in a hilly landscape, then figure out how to clear latrines for further use. “Speed is a huge factor when you’re trying to meet the immediate needs of the people,” Saleh said. When Devex asked about distinctions between innovation in the humanitarian response context versus the international development context, Saleh talked about speed as well as financing. He explained that because emergency funding is deployed to humanitarian crises, money is often more readily available. “A lot of times, innovation is just about contextualizing to your own setting, so it’s important to stay close to the problem and understand the contextual reality.” --— Asif Saleh, senior director of strategy, communications, and empowerment at BRAC “In the development space, speed isn’t as much a factor. Its what’s scalable and what can be done in a low-cost way,” he said. Many innovation leads work at donor agency or NGO headquarters far from developing country contexts where these innovations will be deployed. Saleh is not one of them. “A lot of times, innovation is just about contextualizing to your own setting, so it’s important to stay close to the problem and understand the contextual reality,” Saleh said of his base in Bangladesh. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel — we just have to make a wheel that works for us.” Every November, BRAC holds a frugal innovation forum focused on practitioners in the “global south.” Saleh describes frugal innovation as leveraging community resources, social capital, and indigenous methods to design solutions. The key is to focus on solving the problem, not the product that might eventually solve the problem, so you are not tied to one way of doing things. The central question is: “In a resource-constrained setting, how you can come up with simple solutions that can scale?” Saleh said. Last year, the focus of the frugal innovation forum was on scaling quality education. Saleh talked about ideas that sound good in theory then run up against “a lot of frictions and challenges in countries that do not always work the way people in the West think they should," such as One Laptop Per Child, which critics have called the classic example of devices where the promises that are made exceed the results that are delivered. This year, the focus is on youth, which Saleh said presents a number of challenges that NGOs are not set up to address, in part because many of them are still providing training for skills that may be soon be obsolete with the rise of automation. “This is such a dominant issue, not just in Bangladesh, but everywhere,” Saleh said of youth. “There [is a] lot of economic growth but not enough jobs, so jobless growth is a huge issue we are facing. It’s a stark reality causing social unrest. Aspirations are going up, but the reality is not keeping up with the aspiration.” This November, BRAC will also include an investment committee to determine whether some of the ideas being pitched are investable. Saleh explains that BRAC has always relied on donor funding to finance its programs, but now, it is trying new business models, including cost recovery, investing, and running social enterprises. BRAC sees having a stake in these innovations as one path to financial sustainability.