Muhit Rahman founded the non-governmental organization the Bangladesh Relief Fund in August 2004. The organization gathers funds and invests in select NGOs in Bangladesh to increase social and economic development. The transcript for our team's interview with Mr. Rahman is below. To jump to different questions, use the links in the sidebar on the left.

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I have been involved in charity for a long time, giving money to various people and organizations in Bangladesh. Read More... Several things came together recently. First, I’m beginning to have a little more time in my professional life, I don’t have to work as hard as I did before. Also, I can also afford to spend a little more money on good causes. And last year, there were these big floods when I was in Bangladesh. All of these things came together at the same time, and told me that - you know what - one person by himself can do so much, but it makes more sense to make a more coordinated effort. I chatted with one of my friend’s colleagues, and he said, "that’s a good thing to do." I have a lot of contacts in business and otherwise who are quite charitable. So I decided that perhaps, in the format of a fund, a charitable organization, I might be able to do a lot more than I can do by myself. That’s what made me say, okay, let’s start a fund, an organization, and I’ll go out and try to raise some money for it. Collapse...

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The main benefit is that you can do more. Read More... I don’t live in Bangladesh, I live in the United States, and I go to Bangladesh from time to time. But there is only so much that you can do by yourself; you need to lever off the abilities of others. There are a lot of NGOs in Bangladesh, a huge number, doing all kinds of work, some of it useful, some of it borderline useless. Of course, everything has some value. There are NGOs busy taking photographs of areas of Bangladesh. That’s cultural enlightenment, that’s all great, but I think there’s a lot of basic work that needs to be done. So by working with some NGOs - and we only work with two or three of them, those that we know, and that have a very good reputation of very low overhead or no overhead and of strict honesty - by working with them we can use their expertise on the ground.

For example, in a program in which we’re buying cows for poor villagers, there’s no way we could have gone out there and selected the villagers ourselves correctly. We don’t know the people. We could be taken advantage of and it might be very inefficient. So we are using an NGO that’s been working there for a significant period of time, they know the people, they know almost each and every person. So they’re better able to select and deploy the dollars that we are providing. Then they can follow through. In that program, we need to do a continuous vaccination of the cows, make sure they have access to veterinarians, and administer the program, making sure that when the cows are sold, and that there’s some attempt to collect the money and recycle the funds. We wouldn’t have been able to do it by ourselves. If we were to do it by ourselves, we would have to go and hire people, and then there’s risk involved, and we don’t like to spend any money on overhead. There are advantages to working with other people. It broadens your abilities. Collapse...

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The government [in Bangladesh] is still not a very mature democracy, and it’s not the most reliable organization in Bangladesh. Read More... The government is not equipped for many jobs. It’s a bureaucracy and often times there are high levels of corruption. There is very little accountability - it’s a black hole. You put some money in there and you have no idea what’s going to happen. The government doesn’t set up in villages. If we were to do BRF’s work through government channels, the money might go to the village council chairman, or half or more of it might get misallocated. There’s very little [government] accountability. Collapse...

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It’s too early to tell. We started fundraising a almost two years ago, and we raised a significant amount of funds. Read More... The first money we deployed was in at beginning of last year. But, I am quite happy with the small poultry farm that we started in the Savar [region of Bangladesh]. It’s very small. Right now it employs five people and it has contributed significantly to their well-being. Their standard of living has gone up by a whole bunch.

They were raising a thousand chickens before with money we had lent them outside of the BRF, and they were just barely making ends meet; the scale wasn’t large enough. In February of 2005, we started a second thousand chickens, and they’ve been laying eggs for the past two months or so. The farm is actually making money after paying everybody. We can save these funds and recycle them into other BRF projects. Last month, we started another two thousand chickens, so now there’re four thousand chickens.

And we did something else: the project created employment and it created a ripple effect when we built the sheds for the chickens; instead of using tin and steel, which are longer lasting products, we used bamboo frames and matting, for a couple of reasons. The bamboo is purchased in the local area. It’s grown in the village and it’s an environmentally friendly product. So what if it lasts only half as long as the imported metal, and over the long run, costs slightly more than tin and steel? It helps make the village self-sufficient. It’s not really about making a profit. It doesn’t really matter to me that on $1,000 we would have saved $50. What matters to me is that more of the money is recycled into the village economy through the bamboo, through the technicians, and through the laborers who harvest the bamboo, split the logs into little small lengths and then weave that into bamboo mats. I like that because it multiplies throughout the economy and it’s gratifying to see that some of it is actually producing an income right now. You can point to specific people and show that they are doing well.

But it’s small scale. And unless we are able to multiply the effects by 100 or 1000, and employ 500 or 5,000 people all over the country, it’s not going to be tremendously impactful on the community. So we are working on several other projects that are much bigger in scale. I have high hopes for a fishery, which is an integrated fishery and fruit farm, because it employed in the initial phases 150 people, who are cutting the embankments, excavating the ponds, and then raising the embankments [for the fish ponds]. On a continuous basis it probably employs 20 or more people. It also has a significant opportunity to increase the protein production of the region by cultivating fish. This is a good thing for the diet of Bangladesh. And it’s a larger scale project. We invested about $35,000 in it. Whether or not it’s successful, we’ll know in a couple of years. Collapse...

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I think it’s a very complex question and there are many different things that keep poor people poor, and they are all interrelated, and they rise and fall in significance. Read More... In parts of the world, there is war. Clearly it’s impossible to try to do anything useful, to help others, when people are fighting and killing each other.

In other parts of the world - sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind - diseases such as AIDS have decimated entire generations of people. AIDS has created a whole new generation of problems that are going to last for who knows how many decades. This epidemic will be hard to recover from. I don’t know if the developed world could have done something more active to prevent the spread of AIDS. It certainly could have done more, but how much more effective it would have been, I don’t know.

Then, too, there are natural disasters that sometimes happen with devastating effects. The tsunami was one. In Bangladesh, there are cyclones that happen on the scale that happened here in New Orleans. If that, or the floods, happened in places like Bangladesh, the disaster just sets everybody back down to zero. If someone had accumulated a certain degree of comfort, a hurricane or cyclone can wipe that out, and the person is back down to nothing, and now everybody in the family has to work, and they can’t escape poverty. What keeps people impoverished is the lack of a social infrastructure, a social safety net. Look at what happened when Katrina struck New Orleans. Everybody jumped in and hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be allocated to people and eventually help them recover. Nothing like that exists in Bangladesh. The earthquake that just happened in Kashmir affected three million people, but in terms of the total number of dollars per person spent on the recovery--nothing, practically nothing. These people, these three million people are set down to a zero level. Some of them may have land that they can cultivate again in a few more years, but right now they’re down to zero. And for decades or generations to come, there will be this enormous group of people who will remain impoverished, unless the world, unless we as a whole take a really active look at how to lift them out of poverty and help them become productive global citizens.

Other factors, longer term factors, also play a role in to keeping poor people poor. Democracy, or more aptly, the lack of it, is one. When you don’t have a good government system, a lawful system, it promotes inequality. The poor people are not empowered. They’re easy to trample, they’re easy to rob, they’re easy to exploit. And that’s what happens. In Bangladesh, I know for a fact that when some disaster happens, and the government sends relief, maybe a ton of food grain to a particular area for distribution to the poor people, but the first thing that happens is that half of it gets stolen by those who are in charge of distributing it, and the other half gets distributed to people who are in their political party, people who are favored by them. It’s not very efficient.

The same thing happens with foreign aid from developed countries. When we were traveling to Bangladesh this summer, we ran into the chief of an NGO coming back from Germany. He said a German agency wanted to give $5 million to his NGO for relief projects, but 90% had to be used to hire German nationals as consultants. And the sad part is that these German nationals don’t even speak English, so they will be useless in Bangladesh. Basically it’s a boondoggle. They (the Germans) are going to go and make a lot of money. And they get hazard pay because it’s a tough life. What’s in it for the NGO? They get to use ten percent, and they believe they can do a lot of good with half a million dollars, which is why they trek out to Berlin to beg for the money. Same basic thing happens with funds from the USAID or UNDP. Their programs bring over heavy equipment--you go from place to place in Bangladesh and you will see all these hulks, the skeletons of large excavating equipment, rusting there because some aid program paid for them, somebody granted billions of dollars, which was then used to buy full-priced foreign equipment. The government that gave the equipment doesn’t really care. The sellers of the equipment, they just have their sale. Whether or not that equipment gets used properly or efficiently, nobody cares. There’s a huge amount of inefficiency in all of this.

But having said all of that, the total amount of money we devote to poverty is a pittance. We spend more money on bottled water. We spend ten times more money on bottled water annually in the developed countries, where you don’t really need bottled water. If we spent a tenth of that money in providing clean water for the rest of the world, the problem of unclean water would be largely solved. It’s our ridiculous assignment of priorities to various resources in the developed world. The poor can only help themselves within limits. They don’t have the resources to build a foundation. We have to step in and build the foundations, and teach them how to maintain the structure. So democracy, education, and more money spent providing education to help those in the developing world - it’s going to take a lot, maybe even years or generations before this investment bears fruit, but it surely will. Collapse...

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Rahman, Muhit. Personal Interview. 2005.

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