'Hope Over Fate': Telling the world's best kept secret

Someone had to tell the story of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. Someone had to share the saga of this larger-than-life man, the man behind the world's largest NGO BRAC. Taciturn and adverse to self-promotion, Abed was hardly a man who would be comfortable with penning his own memoirs. And so it seemed only natural that Scott MacMillan would take up this challenging task. After all, Scott was a journalist and he was, and is, Director of Learning and Innovation, BRAC USA. He worked in close association with Abed, was his speech writer too, travelled with him, spent extended periods of time with him, listening, absorbing and storing away the details of this man's life and work.

In an interview with Prothom Alo's Ayesha Kabir, Scott MacMillan speaks about his journey with the book ‘Hope Over Fate: Fazle Hasan Abed and the Science of Ending Global Poverty', about the man himself, BRAC and more.   

How did it all begin? What sparked off the book 'Hope Over Fate'?

Scott Macmillan begins with when he started working for BRAC USA in 2011. "I was a freelance journalist at the time. I was trying to make my way as a travel writer around Africa about a dozen years ago. I was in Kenya at the time, staying in Serena Hotel in Nairobi. Somebody who was working with one of BRAC’s donors was paying for my stay. I had got the development bug, a curiosity about what works and doesn’t work in international development and poverty alleviation. I thought that maybe I could start working in a development organisation. Then my friend at the hotel told me about this organisation called BRAC. And my first reaction was, what is this word? That is the reaction a lot of people have."

He went and looked it up, read about BRAC and its size, its scale and its scope, and his reaction was much the same as a lot of people have today in western countries when they hear about BRAC – "How come nobody ever told me about this!" "It has this kind of aura of being the world’s best kept secret. It was and is today one of the world’s largest development organisations, the world’s largest NGO by some measures. To make a long story short, she told me about this job at BRAC USA which is its North American affiliate. I applied for it and for some reason, they gave it to me."

He continues, "When I talk about the book, I tell this story which always gets a laugh. Fast forward a couple of years. I am working in communications, actually the only person handling communications full time for all of North America for the world’s largest NGO. I met a friend of a friend and we exchanged notes – what do you do, what’s your job – and I said, I work for this organisation called BRAC. It’s the world’s best kept secret. We are big in microfinance, huge in community healthcare and education, we have schools, working with people from background of extreme poverty. It’s the world’s largest NGO and nobody has ever heard of it. And he said, 'Wow, you should really fire whoever handles your publicity!' That was me."

In the years to come Scott started working closely with BRAC's founder, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed. "I don’t even remember how I started working so closely with him, he says, "There were a few moments that maybe created a bond between us. Rana Plaza was one of them. We were in Uganda at the time and he and I worked together on an op-ed that we managed to place in the New York Times. It was very timely. They were still digging people out of the rubble. The death count was still rising. I remember in the article the death count was like 600 and it of course went up to almost double. It was very early days. I basically placed a call to the New York Times. The pitch was something along the lines of – ‘you got a lot of commentary about this tragedy that took place in Bangladesh. I bet you don’t have a Bangladeshi talking about it. And I have the person that has something to say about that.’ So it ran this very powerful statement about the tragedy and I think that helped create a rapport between us."

In the years to come, Scott became Abed's speech writer. They worked together on speeches, articles, op-eds. If Abed was given an honorary degree somewhere, Scott would help with the acceptance speech. He worked with him very closely on the World Food Prize acceptance speech in 2015. "I remember we went to Miami once for an education conference, so there was a lot of time together. In the evenings I would sit in his office and listen to stories from his life. We spent a lot of time in hotel rooms in New York, Miami, in Iowa for the World Food Prize. I spent a lot of time just listening to his stories. At a certain point, I don’t remember exactly when, I came up with the idea – if I am ghost writing, working with you on these speeches, and you have a story to tell the world, why don’t we do a book together?"

The idea initially was that it would be a memoir. Halfway through the project, Abed said, 'No, this isn’t working. Something seems off about it.' "And he was right," says Scott, "The parts that sounded like him weren’t very good, and the parts that were good, didn’t sound like him. This is because he wasn’t a self promoter. He didn’t like telling stories about himself. And so to try to put these stories in his voice didn’t work. He said, ‘Put this project aside for a bit. You come back to it when you are ready and you tell the story in your own voice, under your own name. You will have a free hand to write whatever you want because there is nobody else with whom I’ve spent more time speaking to about BRAC, about my life, about my story. You can tell it.’"

To Scott, that was a privilege of a lifetime. A couple of years later, Abed actually came to Scott and said, “I’ve been talking to a few trusted people, family members, and we think it’s time for you to go back to writing this book.” That was September 2018.

"I had this very naïve idea that I could write it while doing my other job, working for BRAC USA, doing fund raising and other special projects. I had this very naïve idea that I would do it one day a week, like every Friday. If you ever tried to write a book, you would know you can’t just do it on a Friday. It takes you all day just to remember where you left off. So the project just went nowhere. In mid 2019, I said, okay, I gotta focus on this and make one last visit to Bangladesh and fill in some of the details, do some research, gather some stories from the field."

"I visited Bangladesh and had this long road trip from Nilphamari up north down all the way to Patuakhali in the south with my friend Naurin Nuzrat who works for BRAC. It was really exciting. She was my translator, facilitator, fixer, my window into Bangladeshi culture. I could not have done the book without her. This was mid-2019 already."

He continues, "After that road trip, I went to visit Abed bhai. I said, 'How are you?' And he said, 'Honestly?' And he proceeds to tell me dispassionately, almost as though he was talking about a shift in strategy, that had been diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer and that he's been given about four months to live. 'And by the way, that book you are working on, how soon can you have it finished, because I would like to read it' -- he literally said he would like to read this book on his death bed."

"Every God-given hour, vacations, weekends, evenings, I began working on this book furiously, finishing as much of the book as I could. What is there today, 85 per cent of it he read himself. Or it was read to him because towards the end, the ability to read words on a written page began to diminish. So a couple of people, including his daughter Tamara, would read the chapters to him and I knew that he was responding because there were periodically notes in the margins. He didn't change much. It says a  little bit about him and his character that he really did give me a free hand to write what I wanted. I worked for the BRAC family of organisations, and still do, so it might be taken with a grain of salt, that naturally I would write positive things about a person I found so remarkable and work for his organisation. But there were aspects about him, like he would lose his temper sometimes, and I tried to bring out the man in all of his complexity."

Scott continues, "The thing that I noticed about him over the years was that he was not a very good story teller. He was not particularly good at marketing himself. He was not a self-promoter, which is odd. You would think that if somebody is running their own non-profit organisation, you have to be a storyteller, you have to be a self-promoter, be out there in front of people, in front of crowds, telling your story. He really just did not believe in that. He believed in keeping your head down and focusing on the work and letting the work speak for itself. That was part of his ethos. He was not amenable to the 'elevator pitch', of saying what you do, getting it out there, Silicon Valley-style."

Scott found an underlying unity to everything that Sir Fazle Hasan Abed had been doing throughout his life. And there was the idea that hope itself could help people break the poverty trap.

Coming to the title of the book, ‘Hope Over Fate’," Scott recalls, "I don't think it was till 2019, towards the end of this long project, that the name came up. There is a growing body of research by folks like Esther Duflo who won the Nobel Prize in 2019 in economics, on the power of hope. If you give people hope, it has an effect on people's productivity, their livelihood, even their income that cannot really be accounted for by things like their assets or whatever loans you might give them, access to capital, material things, or even training, hard skills. You can give people training, you can give them access to agricultural inputs, you can give people goats and cows and livestock, access to microfinance, all of this, but there is this intangible element which is hope itself."

"Duflo and others cite research showing that hope itself has a profound impact on people rising from poverty. The more I thought about all of Abed's stories going back to 1972, this wasn't a new idea for him at all. If you look at the work he did that was inspired by Paulo Freire in the 1970's, it was about giving people hope, a sense of agency that they themselves could bring about a change in their own lives. It is not just the hope that their future could be better, but that there is something they themselves could do to bring about a better future."

"That was overcoming fatalism. People thought it was their fate to be poor. They never questioned it. Getting people to question that and think critically about their situation, imagine a better future, think about ways they could work together to bring about a better future, change their families, change their communities, change the conditions in which they live, that mindset shift had a profound impact on people's lives."

"So I say in the book, this idea that hope itself can help people overcome the poverty trap, is potentially misleading and perhaps dangerous because it risks creating the impression that poverty is somehow self-inflicted, and that all people need to do is to change their attitude. It is as if all you need is a really good pep-talk and if you change your attitude you can rise out of poverty on your own. This is plainly not the case. Anybody who understands the situation of people living in extreme poverty, know this is not the case. You can provide the goats, the cows, the productive assets, the chickens, the livestock, the vaccinations, access to healthcare, access to education, access to credit, all of these very essential services and tools to which people have been denied for so long, but none of that will mean a thing if people first don't fundamentally believe in the possibility of change. This is what makes BRAC special as an organisation. A lot of organisations address the material aspects of poverty or the hard skills that are needed for people to improve their livelihoods. Or they address the mindset shift, they address the underlying despair and the psychosocial aspects of poverty. But every few organisations do both at the same time. That is the crucial combination that makes BRAC special and that was the driving conviction of Abed's life. That is the meaning of the book title."

Given the continuous political turmoil, persistent poverty, climate change, frequent natural calamities, can we still have hope? Working with BRAC up close with development, what does Scott think?

"It was around 2011-2015 that people started talking about the eradication of extreme poverty within our lifetime," responds Scott MacMillan, "The New York Times had a headline something like - it's no longer crazy to think about eradicating poverty. Abed bhai was very realistic. He did not have much time for grand sweeping statements, he didn't like pontificating. When I wrote the first draft of the Word Food Prize acceptance speech, he chastised me, saying you are having me pontificate. I don't want to pontificate. He didn't have time for these sweeping statements or sound bites, yet even he himself began to come around to the idea that absolute extreme poverty might be eradicated or at least brought down to a very, very low level by 2030 or at least within our lifetime."

He continues, "Around 2016, it was a bad year in the United States in some respects, there was the election of Donald Trump. It was not just in the United States, there were signs all over that countries were becoming more inward looking, protective of their own interests, less globally minded. So even before the pandemic, there was already a growing sense that the eradication of poverty was not quite as achievable as previously expected and that without real changes, the world probably wouldn't hit the target set by the World Bank and other institutions of bringing global extreme poverty at least below 3 per cent. That optimism started to crumble a little bit. Then Covid 19 came along. All of which is a long winded way of saying, there is not much hope. Hope is in short supply."

The question was whether the world would really start to get better. "I think if Abed were alive right now, he would say, 'Take a step back and look at the world. The long term trajectory of human progress is still one of rising standards of living.' There was fear that the pandemic would erase decades of progress, but it did not. It erased years of progress, not decades. In the world as a whole and in regions of the world, extreme poverty is on decline once again. So in this message of hope over fate, there was a certain practicality to his mindset -- we have to be hopeful and not just because it's a way to lift our spirits. We have to be hopeful because that is a prerequisite to positive social change. He would look at the facts dispassionately. He would say yes, there have been setbacks, there are always setbacks, that's the story of Bangladesh, that's the story of BRAC and the story of his life. So many setbacks, so many tragedies. His wife died in childbirth. An average person would have thrown their hands up and given up. But he always took the very, very long view -- 'keep at it, things are getting better.' Bill Clinton once told Abed, ‘You revolutionised the way we all think of development.’

Scott says, "Most of the problems we are facing right now in the world, in Bangladesh and elsewhere, are not fundamentally different. The solutions are there, we just need to apply them diligently. There was an anecdote Abed bhai used to share about Dr Donald Henderson, who eradicated smallpox. The head of WHO at an event asked him, ‘So what’s the next disease to be eradicated, Dr Henderson?’ And he leaned into the microphone and said, ‘Bad management.’ And Abed really believed fundamentally, we had to eradicate the disease of bad management and come up with ways to apply the solutions we already have, rather than reinventing solutions. We already know so many solutions, it is the ‘how’ that we need to perfect. The sub-title of the book is ‘The Science of Ending Global Poverty’. There is science to it.

How is post-Abed BRAC faring?        

Abed bhai believed in the vitality of institutions. He believed strongly that society, civil society needs lasting viable institutions and so that’s the culture he built within BRAC. It is very difficult for people working in BRAC to imagine that Abed bhai somehow is replaceable. But fundamentally, we are all replaceable. Nobody is going to be here forever. That was the approach he took to building the organisation. In the last few months of his life he said to me, ‘The only thing I am thinking about right now is putting BRAC on a solid foundation.” He was focused on building a sustainable institution you could depend on.     

‘Hope Over Fate: Fazle Hasan Abed and the Science of Ending Global Poverty' by Scott MacMillan was launched at the Dhaka Lit Fest recently. How was the Fest?

That brings Scott back to Sir Abed again, "He was such a steadfast supporter of the arts and literature. He made a big donation to the Lit Fest and put it on a solid foundation because he really believed in literature and the arts. It pained him that some people couldn’t enjoy literature as he did, simply because they had the misfortune of growing up illiterate. He believed that human development wasn’t just about income and economic success. Everybody should have an opportunity to live a life of purpose, a meaningful life. That was his ethos."

On an ending note about his book, Scott MacMillan says, "I have written this book for people who have never heard of Abed. In the front of the book, Nicholas Kristoff of The New Times terms Abed as 'one of the unsung heroes of modern times.' He meant that Abed was a hero of the world, not just of Bangladesh."