Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and chairperson of BRAC, was named the recipient of the 41st Annual World Food Prize on 1 July 2015 for his exceptional contribution to improving the global production and distribution of food for those most in need.
The announcement was made by Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn, President of the World Food Prize Foundation, during a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. The Prize, valued at USD 250,000, is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture”.
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Acknowledgement of BRAC’s Work
“Being selected to receive the 2015 World Food Prize is a great honour,” said Sir Fazle in his acceptance statement. “I thank the Foundation for recognising the work of BRAC, which I have had the privilege to lead for the past 43 years. The real heroes in our story are the poor themselves, particularly women battling poverty. In situations of extreme hardship, women are often the ones who must make do with scarce resources. At BRAC, we realised that women needed to be the agents of change in our development efforts.”
Recognition from Global Leaders
In his announcement, Ambassador Quinn praised Sir Fazle’s transformative vision:
“At a time when the world faces the immense challenge of feeding over nine billion people, Sir Fazle Abed and BRAC have created the leading global model for educating girls, empowering women, and lifting entire generations out of poverty. For this monumental achievement, Sir Fazle truly deserves recognition as the 2015 World Food Prize Laureate.”
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also commended Sir Fazle’s impact:
“I offer my sincerest congratulations to Sir Fazle and my appreciation for his work in improving lives, alleviating hunger, and creating pathways out of poverty. His recognition of the importance of engaging women in STEAM fields—science, technology, engineering, agriculture, and mathematics—aligns closely with our vision at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is an honour to join those who see the need for innovative approaches to feeding our rapidly growing population.”
BRAC’s Contribution to Global Food Security
BRAC has played a pivotal role in Bangladesh’s success in halving poverty and hunger levels since 1990, meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals through sustained initiatives in food security, hunger eradication, and poverty reduction. By focusing on scalable, sustainable solutions, BRAC’s agricultural and food programmes have evolved into successful social enterprises, providing rural communities with vital resources, training, and access to stable markets.
Operating in 11 countries, BRAC integrates its agriculture and food security work within a broader framework of poverty eradication. Its programmes empower the poor—especially women and girls—through tools such as microfinance, education, healthcare, legal services, community empowerment, and social enterprises. The organisation also established BRAC University in Dhaka, offering higher education opportunities to drive further socio-economic progress.
Pioneering Women’s Empowerment through Agriculture
Soon after founding BRAC in 1972, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed turned his focus to the social and economic empowerment of women—a groundbreaking approach at the time to lifting communities out of poverty. He was determined to equip rural village and farm women with the tools they needed to take control of their lives and become change-makers within their communities.
In addition to introducing microcredit programmes that provided small loans to women, BRAC launched a sustainable agriculture initiative in Bangladesh centred on poultry farming. Within two decades, the project had grown to involve 1.9 million women, establishing commercial and social networks that linked local activities to the wider national economy and introducing women to the experience of generating genuine profits.
Impact on Agriculture and Food Security
Over his more than four decades of leadership, Sir Fazle’s agricultural and development innovations significantly improved food security for millions, contributing to a measurable reduction in poverty through direct engagement with farmers and small communities worldwide.
Under his guidance, BRAC’s agriculture and food security programmes have enabled more than 500,000 farmers to access efficient farming techniques, proven technologies, and tailored financial services. Through field demonstrations and training, farmers have learned crop intensification methods, benefitted from research and development of new seed varieties, and gained access to high-quality seeds at fair prices.
Integrated Social Enterprises
BRAC’s multi-faceted approach to reducing hunger and poverty includes the creation of a diverse portfolio of integrated enterprises, such as:
Seed production and distribution facilities
Feed mills
Poultry and fish hatcheries
Milk collection centres and processing factories
Tea plantations
Packaging factories
Revenue generated from these social enterprises is reinvested into BRAC’s development work, subsidising primary schools and essential healthcare services for disadvantaged communities.
A Visionary Approach to Poverty Eradication
Through his visionary leadership, Sir Fazle demonstrated a deep understanding of agriculture’s central role in development and the complex factors that sustain poverty. Over the decades, he worked relentlessly to create an enabling environment that ensured food security at both household and community levels. His strategies generated productive employment and income for poor households, empowering them to access nutritious, sustainable sources of food.
Early Life, Education, and Career
Fazle Hasan Abed was born in 1936 into a distinguished family in Baniachong, in the Habiganj district of present-day Bangladesh. His maternal grandfather served as a minister in the colonial government of Bengal, and a great-uncle was the first Bengali to sit on the Governor of Bengal’s executive council. He attended Pabna Zilla School before completing his higher secondary education at Dhaka College.
Known simply as Abed to his family and friends, he travelled to Scotland to study Naval Architecture at the University of Glasgow. He later shifted career paths, moving to London to qualify as a management accountant, graduating from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in 1962. During this time, Abed developed a deep interest in world literature, immersing himself in the works of Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, and Rilke. “My love affair with English and European literature continued for almost a decade,” he would later recall. He also cultivated a lifelong appreciation for Western classical music, particularly the compositions of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
In 1969, Abed returned to his homeland, accepting a position with the Shell Oil Company in Chittagong. Within two years, he rose to become head of the company’s accounting department, enjoying the comfortable life of a corporate executive. However, two catastrophic events in 1970–71 profoundly altered the course of his life—and that of millions of Bangladeshis. A devastating tropical cyclone swept across the country, destroying farms, villages, and towns, followed by a brutal nine-month War of Independence from Pakistan. Together, the cyclone and the war claimed well over three million lives and displaced an additional ten million people.
In 1971, Abed resigned from Shell Oil. The following year, he founded the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee—BRAC’s original name—to address the urgent needs of a nation left shattered. Initially focused on relief efforts, the organisation quickly evolved towards long-term community development, with the core objectives of poverty alleviation and the empowerment of the poor. It was later renamed the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.
From the outset, Abed was determined that BRAC should not foster dependency. He recognised that lasting progress required a clear understanding of the social and economic realities facing the poor, and that strategies must empower communities rather than make them reliant on aid. With this vision, he pursued a broad-spectrum development model, integrating agricultural, economic, and social initiatives.
Believing economic independence to be a cornerstone of poverty reduction, Abed pioneered a microfinance programme targeted at women. Small loans were provided through village support groups, which also offered skills development and organisational training—an approach that would later become a hallmark of BRAC’s success.
Leadership of BRAC – Innovative, Visionary, Resilient, and Resourceful
From its inception, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed directed his efforts towards enabling the poor to develop the capacity to shape and control their own destinies. He sought multi-faceted and innovative solutions to complex social problems, encouraging BRAC’s researchers and staff to spend significant time in the field, understanding on-the-ground realities and designing programmes that directly addressed them.
As one programme director observed:
“BRAC encourages you to experiment and learn from your mistakes. It gives its people room to grow. If you identify a social need, you can try to build a development programme to meet that need.”
Adopting the philosophy of thinking local, acting global, BRAC has extended its anti-poverty solutions beyond Bangladesh to ten other developing countries, including Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Liberia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines.
Agricultural Innovation and Food Security
Under Sir Fazle’s leadership, BRAC has driven transformative advances in Bangladesh’s poultry, seed, and dairy industries, as well as in agricultural sectors across the developing world. The organisation’s agriculture and food security programmes aim to increase crop and livestock production while ensuring environmental sustainability, adaptability to climate change, and affordability for marginal and small-scale farmers.
Central to this approach is a continuous cycle of innovation—bringing improved inputs and technologies to farmers, and feeding their practical experiences back into research and development.
In the mid-1970s, Abed and his team identified a significant challenge: local chickens were small, prone to illness, and produced fewer eggs compared to commercial breeds. The root cause was poor-quality feed and limited access to poultry vaccines. Abed’s solution was both practical and ingenious—producing affordable vaccines and preserving them inside bananas, making use of an abundant local resource. As healthier, vaccinated chicks became common, demand grew for high-quality, low-cost feed. BRAC responded by promoting maize cultivation as a sustainable feed source, which dramatically boosted poultry productivity and efficiency.
Market-Oriented Social Enterprises
As BRAC expanded to become the largest non-governmental organisation in the world, Sir Fazle ensured it integrated development assistance with market-oriented, self-sustaining models. Alongside the poultry initiative, BRAC established seed processing plants in Bangladesh capable of handling around 5,500 metric tonnes of high-yield rice, maize, and vegetable seeds annually, distributed through a micro-franchised, hub-and-spoke network of self-employed sellers offering fair prices for both buyers and producers. In 2012, a similar facility was launched in Uganda.
Sir Fazle also invested heavily in agricultural research and development, partnering with national and international institutions to produce high-yielding, hybrid, and climate-resilient crop varieties. Notable breakthroughs include salt- and submergence-tolerant rice for flood-prone areas, and the introduction of maize and sunflower to previously fallow land, increasing both food production and farmer incomes.
Global Reach and Sustainable Impact
Today, BRAC operates with over 110,000 employees worldwide and a network of 150,000 trained entrepreneurs delivering affordable goods and services—such as seeds, medicines, and training—to rural communities. Many of BRAC’s initiatives function as social enterprises delivering a “dual bottom line” of financial return and social benefit, making them scalable and sustainable in a world where the population is projected to exceed nine billion by 2050.
Through BRAC, Sir Fazle has championed the empowerment of women and girls via microfinance, education, healthcare, and leadership in community decision-making. “We have always used an approach to development that puts power in the hands of the poor themselves, especially women and girls,” he explained. “Educated girls turn into empowered women, and as we have seen in Bangladesh and beyond, the empowerment of women leads to major improvements in quality of life for everyone, particularly the poor.”
In line with this commitment, BRAC has pledged to reach an additional 2.7 million girls in low-income countries over five years through primary and pre-primary education, teacher training, adolescent empowerment initiatives, scholarships, and related programmes.
International Recognition
Dr M.S. Swaminathan, Chairman of the World Food Prize Selection Committee and the first World Food Prize Laureate (1987), described Sir Fazle as a “strategic thinker, and a man with a future vision.” He noted that while BRAC was initially established in the context of post-war reconstruction in Bangladesh with a focus on basic needs and livelihoods, Abed quickly recognised the value of complementing, rather than duplicating, state efforts.
Swaminathan praised BRAC’s financial independence, achieved through a network of commercial ventures—including printing presses, poultry and dairy businesses, a hotel, conference facilities, retail outlets, and BRAC University—with surpluses reinvested into its development programmes.
Echoing this sentiment, Dr Paul Collier, Professor of Economics at Oxford University and author of The Bottom Billion, hailed BRAC as “the most astounding social enterprise in the world.”