BRAC

The mission of BRAC is to empower communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and social injustice. All of BRAC’s interventions aim to achieve large-scale, positive change. It is a global pioneer in education, currently operating the largest private, secular education system in the world. In Bangladesh, BRAC offers non-formal, primary education free of charge to students. Its focus is on enrolling children not currently served by government-run schools or private schools, especially children from very poor or marginalized families. BRAC operates about 23,000 schools across all 64 districts and has 700,000 students enrolled in Bangladesh. Of these schools, 2,100 are in urban slums in six cities. The BRAC model is highly cost effective and capital expenses are minimal given that all school premises are rented from the community. Since the organizations inception in 1972, BRAC has demonstrated high implementation capability and success in both educational and non-educational programs throughout Bangladesh.

BRAC is a Bangladeshi development organisation dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the poor to bring about change in their own lives. Today, BRAC is present in 11 countries and reaches more than 100 million beneficiaries.

Through its low-cost education programmes, BRAC offers: 

• Non-formal pre-primary and primary education,
• Support to formal schools,
• Programmes for adolescents, and
• Free community learning centers.

BRAC focusses its efforts on enrolling children not currently served by government primary schools or private schools. In particular, the organisation focusses on children from poor and marginalised families.

EAC and BRAC have partnered to enroll 170,000 OOSC via several multi-year projects, including the ‘Boat School’ (13,000) ‘Urban Slum School’ (62,000) programmes, and now the ‘Bridge School’ (60,000) and TLCs for forcibly displaced Myanmar children (35,000) initiatives. As Bangladesh’s OOSC population has diverse needs, BRAC is implementing tailored interventions to overcome barriers and increase access to quality primary education. For instance, in the Haor floodplain, BRAC is utilising purpose-built boats as primary schools, as well as scaling up its successful urban-schools model to reach OOSC in and around the slums of Barisal, Chittagong, Comilla, Dhaka, Gazipur, Jessore, Khulna, Mymensingh, Narsingdi, Rajshahi, Rangpur and Sylhet. In addition, EAC and BRAC are implementing a bridge-school programme to address the dropout prevalence between classes 2 and 4, where rates are particularly pronounced amongst vulnerable and disadvantaged children in the country’s urban and hard-to-reach areas. Most recently, EAC and BRAC working in the Coz Bazar District of Bangladesh to provide quality education to forcibly displaced children from Myanmar.

For more information about this EAC Implementing Partner, please visit BRAC’s website.