BRAC began in 1972, in the ruins of Bangladesh's war of independence. Fazle Hasan Abed quit his accounting job in the UK to return home and help with relief work — only to find that handouts didn't solve the problem: after three months of food aid, people were still hungry. In 1974, he met a group of village women pooling money to buy a goat, and from that grew BRAC's core idea, the "lowest threshold of entry": instead of designing a perfect anti-poverty program, ask what a person needs, at minimum, to change their own life — the answer turned out to be about $20.

That entry point grew into an entire self-built system: no school, BRAC built one; no doctor, BRAC trained its own community health workers; no reliable way to move money, BRAC incubated the mobile payment platform bKash. Rather than farm problems out to others, BRAC turned every gap it found on the front lines into a new program of its own.

Today, BRAC is the largest development organization in the world, with more than 90,000 frontline staff across 11 countries. Its bKash platform is Bangladesh's first unicorn, valued at $2 billion. Bill Gates has said BRAC "achieved something very few have — large-scale health intervention among the poorest populations on earth."