Introducing Hope Over Fate: the Story of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed and BRAC

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC and “one of the unsung heroes of modern times,” according to Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, authorized his own biography before dying of brain cancer in 2019. Author Scott MacMillan wrote Hope Over Fate based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Abed and his friends, family and co-workers. Credit: courtesy of BRACBy Scott MacMillanRedding Conn, USA, Aug 1 2022 (IPS) About seven years ago, I started working on a project with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC. It was originally supposed to be a memoir: the story of Abed, the mild-mannered accountant who would rid the world of poverty, as told by the man himself. I was privileged to be Abed’s speechwriter for the last several years of his life, and I would sit for hours listening to stories from his remarkable life: of his boyhood in British India, his love life in London in the 1960s, his three marriages, and how, in 1972, with a few thousand pounds from the sale of his flat in Camden, he launched a small nonprofit organization to aid refugees, originally called the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee. Many people would go on to call BRAC, which Abed led until his death in 2019, the world’s most effective anti-poverty organization. That seemed like a story worth telling in full, and after some coaxing, Abed gave me permission to begin ghostwriting his autobiography. He was an exceptionally private person, however, and cringed at anything with a wh...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Asia-Pacific Economy & Trade Education Global Headlines Health Migration & Refugees Trade & Investment Women & Economy IPS UN Bureau Source Type: news