BRAC’s 16 social enterprises address community needs whilst increasing self-sufficiency.
The ‘BRAC model’ is a collaborative network of enterprises, development programmes and investments, all of which serve the vision of empowering the poorest people, alleviating social imbalance and enhancing financial sustainability. Our social enterprises provide value-chain linkages to support entrepreneurs increase the productivity and efficiency of their enterprises. Learn more about our business approach to doing good here.
OUR APPROACH
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Triple Bottom Line – People, Planet, Profit
BRAC Social Enterprises are both financially and socially profitable ventures in sectors like retail, dairy, poultry, fisheries and seed. Designed to benefit the poor, these enterprises help fulfil BRAC’s social mission at a greater scale – by supporting micro-enterprise development, generating livelihood opportunities, training entrepreneurs to improve their skills and introducing better quality inputs to increase productivity of their assets. BRAC helps community members become self-sustaining producers, and ensure market access for their products and services.
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Financially Self-Sustaining
The success of BRAC’s social enterprises not only allows them to maintain their commitment to alleviating poverty, but generates significant revenues which in turn support BRAC’s development programmes. Currently BRAC’s activities are 73 per cent self financed, which significantly reduces donor dependency, and allows funds to be re-investment in the enterprises themselves.
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Social Markets
In Bangladesh BRAC operates 16 social enterprises. Each of BRAC’s 16 enterprises has a clear social mission, ranging from helping farmers develop improved breeds of livestock to empowering rural artisans:
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HIGHLIGHTS
Aarong
BRAC’s flagship social enterprise, Aarong, created in 1978 to establish livelihoods for women in the crafts sector as well as to protect and promote traditional artisanal crafts. It was established as a retail outlet that offered a fair price, timely payments and design support, while introducing high quality uniquely designed crafts to urban markets. Aarong reaches more than 65,000 artisans. Read more
BRAC Dairy
One of our largest social enterprises, addresses inefficiencies along the dairy supply chain, ultimately increasing the market stability and ensuring fair pay for dairy farmers. It also provides high quality milk products to urban consumers. Today, BRAC Dairy collects around 120,000 litres of milk each day from 54,000 marginalized farmers. Read more
BRAC Chicken
BRAC Chicken is a driving force for growth in the poultry sector in Bangladesh and is a key local supplier for KFC. Today BRAC’s poultry operations include farms that produce high-yield varieties of day-old chicks, commercial broiler farms that produce adult chickens, a broiler processing plant and even a poultry disease diagnostics laboratory. Read more
‘most astonishing social enterprise’
Ali Rumee from BRAC speaks in the Guardian about our model. He says “BRAC’s enterprises are not run as truly commercial businesses but to implement our mission of working with people whose lives are dominated by extreme poverty, illiteracy, disease and other handicaps and strive to bring about positive changes in their quality of life.” Read the article
