Fazle Hasan Abed

Fazle Hasan Abed (27 April 1936 – 20 December 2019) was the founder of BRAC, one of the world's largest non-governmental organisations. Born at Baniachong into a Bengali Muslim zamindar family, he studied naval architecture at the University of Glasgow and then management accountancy in London, and worked as a finance executive with Shell Oil in East Pakistan. After the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 Liberation War he sold his London flat, returned to the newly independent Bangladesh and founded BRAC in 1972, building it over the following decades into an organisation working in education, health, microfinance and human rights in all 64 Bangladeshi districts and then in ten countries across Asia and Africa. He was knighted in 2010, and his awards include the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1980), the World Food Prize (2015) and the Yidan Prize (2019). ^{1 2}

He was born in the village of Baniachong, in present-day Habiganj District, one of eight children of Siddiq Hasan and Syeda Sufia Khatun; his maternal grandfather, Syed Muazzemuddin Hossain, had been a minister for agriculture and education in Bengal in the last years of British rule. He passed his matriculation at Pabna and intermediate at Dhaka College, left home at eighteen for the University of Glasgow to study naval architecture, then switched to the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in London, completing his professional education in 1962. ¹

He returned to East Pakistan to join Shell Oil and rose to head its finance division. During his time there the devastating Bhola cyclone of 1970 killed 300,000 people; with friends he created HELP, an organisation providing relief and rehabilitation on the island of Manpura, which had lost three-quarters of its population. When the Liberation War began he took refuge in the United Kingdom, where he set up Action Bangladesh to lobby European governments for his country's independence. ¹

When the war ended in December 1971 he sold his flat in London and returned, using the proceeds to begin the long-term work of improving the living conditions of the rural poor, starting in the remote Sulla region of north-eastern Bangladesh; the work became BRAC in 1972. BRAC grew to operate in all 64 Bangladeshi districts through interventions in education, healthcare, microfinance, skills, human rights, agriculture and enterprise development, and went international in 2002, beginning with Afghanistan and expanding to ten countries across Asia and Africa. Abed led it as executive director (1972–2001) and then as chairperson of its governing body and of related bodies such as BRAC Bank and BRAC University until his death. ^{1 3}

He held memberships and chairmanships in many national and international bodies, among them the World Bank's NGO Committee, the International Commission on Health Research for Development, and the UN Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in 2010, was the first laureate of the WISE Prize for Education in 2011, and received the Olof Palme Prize (2001), the World Food Prize (2015) and the Yidan Prize for Education Development (2019), as well as honorary doctorates from universities including Oxford, Yale, Columbia and Princeton. Bangladesh awarded him the Independence Award posthumously in 2025. ^{1 3}

He was admitted to hospital in late November 2019 with breathing problems and physical weakness, and died in Dhaka on 20 December 2019 while undergoing treatment for a malignant brain tumour, aged 83. After a namaz-e-janaza (funeral prayer) at the Army Stadium, he was buried at Banani graveyard in Dhaka on 22 December. ^{1 2}

The sources read for this entry state that Abed "belonged to a Bengali Muslim family", record the funeral prayer held before his burial, and give a generic Wikidata religion value of Islam with no school named; no source names a school or affiliation for him personally. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown in the museum's data, with what the sources say preserved verbatim in the faith note of his record. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.