The problem worth solving

For most of modern history, the world has been studied from somewhere else. The questions that shaped economics, public health and development were framed in the universities of the Global North. The countries of the South supplied the case studies, the data and the problems. Knowledge travelled one way: made in the North, applied in the South.

That imbalance is still visible in the numbers. Between 2012 and 2021, researchers in G20 countries co-authored three-quarters of the world’s scientific publications. Bangladesh, a nation of nearly 170 million people, spent just 0.30 per cent of GDP on research and development in 2020–21, among the lowest rates anywhere, and less than a tenth of that went to basic research. Its problems are studied closely; its answers are too often written elsewhere.

At home, the gap takes a second form: a mismatch between degrees and purpose. Gross tertiary enrolment has risen to nearly 24 per cent, yet in 2024 some 885,000 university graduates were unemployed, a graduate unemployment rate of 13.5 per cent. Too many young people leave university with a certificate but without the judgement, adaptability and sense of purpose that a changing economy and society demand. Expansion without rethinking what education is for produces credentials, not capability.

This is the double problem BRAC University was created to address: a country that consumes far more knowledge than it creates, and graduates who are trained but not always prepared, whether for work, for public life or for leadership.

BRAC University. Photo: Collected

Knowledge has a geography

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed knew this from experience. BRAC did not become one of the world’s largest development organisations by importing solutions. It grew by learning what worked in Bangladesh’s villages and then scaling it: oral rehydration taught door to door, non-formal schools built around children who had been left out, finance designed around women’s lives. Ideas born in Bangladesh were later adopted across Asia and Africa.

When he founded BRAC University on 16 June 2001, he gave it the same instinct. Its premise is that the Global South is not a laboratory for other people’s theories. It is where theory should be made. The defining challenges of this century, from climate displacement and inequality to fragile governance and public health, are most acute here. So the most consequential answers are likely to come from here too.

That conviction shapes how the university builds partnerships. In June 2025, it launched a joint PhD in the political economy of development with SOAS University of London, its first doctoral partnership abroad. What makes it significant is its design. It is jointly taught and jointly supervised, and doctoral candidates can be based in Dhaka or London. It reverses the familiar pattern in which the South sends its best minds north to be trained, and treats Dhaka as a place where world-class scholarship is produced, not merely studied.

Education as a moral project

In its dominant modern form, the university is a sorting machine. It certifies talent for the market and measures success by placement. BRAC University starts from an older and deeper idea, one with strong roots in South Asia.

Rabindranath Tagore built Santiniketan on the belief that education should unite intellect, nature and community, rather than separate the learner from the world. Paulo Freire, whose thinking shaped BRAC’s early adult literacy work, argued that real learning begins when people understand their own reality well enough to change it. Sir Abed added a practical conviction: education is the most reliable way to unlock human potential, above all for those whom systems tend to overlook.

That philosophy is built into the curriculum. Every BRAC University student, whether an engineer, a pharmacist or a business major, studies language, history, ethics and society alongside their discipline. This is not ornament. In an age when artificial intelligence can generate answers on demand, judgement, empathy and the ability to ask the right question become the scarcest skills of all.

Its sharpest expression is the Residential Semester, which requires of every undergraduate. Students spend about 90 days at the residential campus in Khagan, Savar. They share dormitories, cook and serve meals for one another. They study Bangla, Bangladesh’s history and ethics, and work with schoolchildren from the surrounding community. No student graduates without it.

In effect, it is an education in humility: learning to serve others, and to depend on them, before being trusted to lead them. BRAC University’s graduates have carried that formation into public service, business, development, media and academia, in Bangladesh and across the world.

Knowledge that leaves the campus

The test of knowledge creation is not how much is published but what changes because of it. BRAC University’s record is best read in that light.

In 2017, three of its graduates designed, built and assembled BRAC Onnesha at Japan’s Kyushu Institute of Technology. The 10-centimetre, one-kilogramme cube was deployed from the International Space Station in July that year and tracked from a ground station on the university’s own roof, becoming Bangladesh’s first nanosatellite. Its real significance was the proof it offered: that young engineers from Bangladesh could do frontier space science, not only read about it. The same spirit carried the Mongol Tori rover team to eighth place in the world and second in Asia at the University Rover Challenge 2025.

The university’s institutes apply that principle at scale. The BRAC Institute of Governance and Development studies how states and markets actually work for the poor. The James P Grant School of Public Health builds evidence for health systems with limited resources. The BRAC Institute of Educational Development advances early childhood development. Its centres extend the work into peace and justice, entrepreneurship, climate change and social innovation, where students design solutions with climate-affected communities rather than for them.

Even the campus is an argument. In one of the world’s densest cities, the Merul Badda building turned a neglected site into roughly more than 150,000 square metres of learning space. About 40 per cent of it is naturally ventilated open space; rainwater harvesting and recycling cut water use by nearly half; the roof carries solar panels. In December 2025 it won the RIBA Asia Pacific Award for Sustainability and Resilience. The lesson for the Global South is plain: climate-responsive design is not an imported luxury. It can be built here, on a tight urban site, at scale.

Reimagining excellence

For universities in the Global South, excellence has usually been a borrowed standard, defined by yardsticks designed elsewhere for institutions with very different histories, resources and purposes. A university that measured itself only by those yardsticks would forget why it exists.

That is the meaning of the silver jubilee theme, Reimagining Excellence, launched on 27 April 2026, the 90th anniversary of Sir Abed’s birth. It asks that a university also be judged by relevance: by whom its education reaches, by whether its research answers questions its own society is asking, and by whether its knowledge returns to the communities that informed it.

The next frontiers follow that logic. Each matches a need Bangladesh cannot afford to outsource. Artificial intelligence, so that the country helps shape the technology rather than only consuming systems trained elsewhere. Life sciences and agritech, for a nation whose food security is directly exposed to climate change. Nursing and caregiving, as societies age at home and abroad and the global care economy grows. Fashion design, so that one of the world’s largest garment exporters moves from making clothes to creating value. And sustainability and innovation, which run through all of them.

Twenty-five years ago, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed imagined a university that would create knowledge, serve humanity and prepare leaders for a better world. Today, BRAC University is showing that such an institution can be built in Dhaka, and that it has something to teach the world.

Rooted in Bangladesh and connected to the world, it now looks forward with a clear sense of purpose.