BRAC

July 2009"); ?> _____________________________ BRAC is a large, Bangladesh-based organization that primarily focuses on economic empowerment programs. BRAC focuses on microfinance (37%), other economic empowerment programs (38%), education (16%) and other programs (9%).1 For more on BRAC's programs, see the "programs" page on BRAC's website.2 We believe that BRAC is notable for:

• Commitment to monitoring and evaluation: BRAC maintains a research-focused website, BRAC Research.3 This site publishes papers that review BRAC's programs and evaluate approaches to improving people's incomes.
• Reputation: BRAC has a strong reputation among organizations with whom it partners. A publicly attributable example of positive feedback we've heard about BRAC: "BRAC is a great partner because they're highly organized, they have a great reputation, and they have a lot of infrastructure to be able to roll out a program like this. They're sort of top of the line in terms of partners – but there's really only one BRAC. Our goal is to find organizations that are as much like them as possible."4

We cannot be confident in BRAC's impact because: Despite the apparent commitment to monitoring and evaluation, BRAC's research does not appear to make it possible to evaluate the impact of the organization as a whole. Specifically, program evaluations appear not to be available for some of BRAC's largest programs.5

Sources

• BRAC original site. Available at http://www.brac.net/, accessed 7/7/09.
• BRAC Annual Report. 2007. Available online at http://www.brac.net/downloads_files/BRAC_Annual_Report_2007.pdf, accessed 6/29/09.
• Phone conversation with Miriam Stone, VisionSpring's Vice President of Business Development, 4/20/09.

• 1. BRAC Annual Report 2007, pg 68.
• 2. http://brac.net/index.php?nid=65, accessed 6/30/09 (note that programs are listed on the left-hand side).
• 3. http://www.bracresearch.org/, accessed 6/30/09
• 4. Conversation with VisionSpring's Vice President of Business Development, Miriam Stone. Full paraphrased transcript available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/givewell/message/95, 4/20/09.
• 5. We searched http://www.bracresearch.org/ for evaluations of Employment and Income programs (which are part of BRAC's Economic Development area). We searched for the broad area ("Programme Support Enterprises" and "Economic Development") and evaluations of smaller, specific programs ("seed enterprises" and "feed mills") but did not find program evaluation documents.