We are witness to monumental human progress.
Over the past few decades, the expansion of the global marketplace
has lifted a third of the world's population out of extreme poverty.
Yet we are also witness to an astounding failure.
Our efforts to lift people up
have left behind those in the harshest forms of poverty,
the ultra poor.
What it means to be ultra poor goes beyond the monetary definition
that we're all familiar with:
living on less than two dollars a day.
It goes even beyond not having assets
like livestock or land.
To be ultra poor means to be stripped
of your dignity, purpose and self-worth.
It means living in isolation,
because you're a burden to your own community.
It means being unable to imagine a better future
for yourself and your family.
By the end of 2019,
about 400 million people
were living in ultra poverty worldwide.
That's more than the populations of the United States and Canada combined.
And when calamity strikes,
whether it's a pandemic, a natural disaster or a man-made crisis
these numbers spike astronomically higher.
My father, Fazle Abed,
gave up a corporate career
to establish BRAC here in Bangladesh in 1972.
Bangladesh was a wreck,
having just gone through a devastating cyclone
followed by a brutal war for independence.
Working with the poor,
my father realized that poverty
was more than the lack of income and assets.
It was also a lack of hope.
People were trapped in poverty
because they felt their condition
was immutable.
Poverty, to them,
was like the sun and the moon,
something given to them by God.
For poverty reduction programs to succeed,
they would need to instill hope and self-worth
so that, with a little support,
people could lift themselves out of poverty.
BRAC went on to pioneer the graduation approach,
a solution to ultra poverty
that addresses both income poverty
and the poverty of hope.