AKF’s civil society programme, which is integrated with ECD activities, assists local NGO partners to develop their organisational capacity in the areas of gender equality, financial management, strategic planning, human resource management, resource mobilisation, and monitoring and evaluation, among other key areas.
Support for BRAC
For many years, the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) supported an NGO known by the initials BRAC, which continues to be a star performer in the galaxy of rural development and non-formal education programmes in South Asia.
BRAC started as an almost entirely donor funded, small-scale relief and rehabilitation project to help the country overcome the devastation and trauma of the Liberation War. Today, BRAC has emerged as an independent, virtually self-financed paradigm in sustainable human development. It is the largest in the world, employing 97,192 people, and reaches over 100 million people in all 64 districts of the country.
In 2005, the Aga Khan Foundation, through the BRAC-AKFC Learning Partnership, conducted research to extract best practices from BRAC’s innovative programme, Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction (CFPR), which targets the ultra-poor. The Partnership aimed to deepen and broaden the impact of BRAC’s CFPR project - within Bangladesh, across South Asia, and internationally - by drawing on the global best practices in poverty reduction for the ultra-poor and by sharing lessons emerging from CFPR with the broader development community.
The programme, with support from the Canadian government, included research on enterprise and market development and a comparative study between CFPR and other strategies targeting the ultra-poor in Bangladesh.
