BRAC is playing a complementary role with the government in attaining millennium development goals for Bangladesh, said Mahabub Hossain, executive director of the development organisation.

Highlighting some success stories, BRAC has set a target to help the country achieve the MDGs by 2015 as it works to empower people and communities in areas of poverty, illiteracy, diseases and social injustice, said Hossain.

He delineated BRAC's mission at a news conference on the launch of its annual report in Dhaka yesterday.

“Our financial statement will increase accountability and transparency to the foreign loan givers,” said Hossain.

Reaching technologies to farmers to support food production, combating extreme poverty, reducing maternal and infant mortality, diversifying microfinance services, and climate changes are some of the highlights featured in the report.

“In the field of health and education and poverty reduction, the results have been very encouraging,” BRAC said in a statement.

BRAC's pre-primary education programme to encourage enrolment had almost 3.29 lakh children.

BRAC is currently working on reducing the dropouts and reaching the areas which are hard to reach and have fewer government schools. The non-formal primary schools in 2010 had almost 6.10 lakh students.

Similarly, in 10 districts, BRAC's areas of operation, the rate of maternal mortality has come down to 141 per thousand in urban areas and 157 in rural areas, remarkably close to attaining the MDG goal of 144, according to the report.

On the poverty alleviation front, beyond traditional microfinance, BRAC has reached out to almost 80,000 extremely poor households through asset and technical assistance transfer.

“We are trying to find a way to reduce poverty. We work for peace building instead of peace keeping in South Asian countries,” said Imran Matin, deputy executive director of BRAC International.

“We also work to develop the agriculture sector in Bangladesh,” said Monoranjan Mondol, head of BRAC's agriculture programme.

With efforts of BRAC and BRAC International put together, they have almost 13.8 crore people across the world within the reach of some kind of BRAC services.

Outside Bangladesh, BRAC has expanded its activities in nine other countries in Asia, Africa and Caribbean region.

News: The Daily Star/ Bangladesh/ July-10-2011