BRAC is an international development organisation based in Bangladesh. In order to receive foreign donations, BRAC was subsequently registered under the NGO Affairs Bureau of the Government of Bangladesh. BRAC is the largest non-governmental development organisation in the world, in terms of number of employees as of September 2016. Established by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 1972 after the independence of Bangladesh, BRAC is present in all 64 districts of Bangladesh as well as 11 other countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. BRAC states that it employs over 90,000 people, roughly 70 percent of whom are women, and that it reaches more than 126 million people with its services. The organisation is partly self-funded through a number of social enterprises that include a dairy and food project, a chain of retail handicraft stores called Aarong, seed and Agro, and chicken. BRAC has operations in 12 countries of the world. History Known formerly as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, then as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and later as Building Resources Across Communities, BRAC was initiated in 1972 by Sir Fazlé Hasan Abed at Shallah Upazillah in the district of Sunamganj as a small-scale relief and rehabilitation project to help returning war refugees after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. 14 thousand homes had to be rebuilt as part of the relief effort, as well as several hundred fishing boats; BRAC claims to have done this within nine months, as well as opening medical centres and providing other essential services. Until the mid-1970s, BRAC concentrated on community development through village development programmes that included agriculture, fisheries, cooperatives, rural crafts, adult literacy, health and family planning, vocational training for women and construction of community centres. A Research and Evaluation Division (RED) was set up to evaluate its activities and decide direction, and in 1977, BRAC began taking a more targeted approach by creating Village Organisations (VO) to assist the landless, small farmers, artisans, and vulnerable women. That same year BRAC set up a commercial printing press to help finance its activities. The handicraft retail chain called Aarong was established the following year. In the late 1970s, diarrhoea was a leading cause of child mortality in Bangladesh. In February 1979, BRAC began a field trial, in two villages of what was then Sulla thana, of a campaign to combat diarrhoea. The following year they scaled up the operation and named it the