Founded in 1972, BRAC is a Bangladeshi development organisation dedicated to alleviating poverty by empowering the poor to bring about change in their own lives. Today, BRAC is present in 11 countries and reaches more than 100 million beneficiaries.
Through its low-cost education programmes, BRAC offers:
- Non-formal pre-primary and primary education,
- Support to formal schools,
- Programmes for adolescents, and
- Free community learning centers.
In Bangladesh, BRAC operates 23,000 schools across all 64 of the country’s districts and has enrolled approximately 700,000 students. BRAC focusses its efforts on enrolling children not currently served by government primary schools or private schools. In particular, the organisation focusses on children from poor and marginalised families.
EAC and BRAC have partnered to enrol 170,000 OOSC via several multi-year projects, including the ‘Boat School’ (13,000) ‘Urban Slum School’ (62,000) programmes, and now the ‘Bridge School’ (60,000) and TLCs for forcibly displaced Myanmar children (35,000) initiatives. As Bangladesh’s OOSC population has diverse needs, BRAC is implementing tailored interventions to overcome barriers and increase access to quality primary education. For instance, in the Haor floodplain, BRAC is utilising purpose-built boats as primary schools, as well as scaling up its successful urban-schools model to reach OOSC in and around the slums of Barisal, Chittagong, Comilla, Dhaka, Gazipur, Jessore, Khulna, Mymensingh, Narsingdi, Rajshahi, Rangpur and Sylhet. In addition, EAC and BRAC are implementing a bridge-school programme to address the dropout prevalence between classes 2 and 4, where rates are particularly pronounced amongst vulnerable and disadvantaged children in the country’s urban and hard-to-reach areas. Most recently, EAC and BRAC working in the Coz Bazar District of Bangladesh to provide quality education to forcibly displaced children from Myanmar.
For more information about this EAC Implementing Partner, please visit BRAC’s website.
Projects
Non-Formal Primary-Level Education to Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Citizens
BRAC, a Bangladesh-based organisation widely recognised for its ability to design, implement and scale comprehensive, community-based development programmes, is actively providing large-scale services to forcibly displaced 35,000 Myanmar nationals (FDMN) arriving in the country.
Bridge School Programme for OOSC
Over the course of a five-year period, BRAC will implement a nationwide ‘Bridge School Programme’, aiming to enrol 60,000 vulnerable and disadvantaged OOSC across Bangladesh into quality primary education.
BRAC Urban Slums Schools
With the support of EAC co-funding, BRAC is establishing 2,000 single classroom schools in the urban slums of Bangladesh in order to enroll 62,000 children who are currently out of school into quality primary education programs.
Boat Schools for Rural Children
EAC and BRAC are working in Bangladesh through the use of boat schools to break down the barriers that children face to accessing education in disaster prone and remote rural areas, where households are constrained due to challenging geographies and the negative consequences of extreme weather.
