The backstory to BRAC, a humanitarian NGO touching the lives of 120 million worldwide, is a fascinating journey borne from the rubble of Bangladesh’s liberation war more than 50 years ago. My colleague Omar Mohammed writes how it transformed from a cash-strapped, one-nation charity into a sprawling multinational that could serve as a blueprint for development organizations the world over.

Fazle Abed, a British-educated naval architect and accountant, was so horrified by the war that turned millions of his countrymen into refugees that he left the private sector, sold his apartment in London, and returned home to build BRAC — then known as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee.

Omar spoke to Shameran Abed, BRAC International’s executive director, about the founder’s legacy and how it’s continued to grow after his death in 2019.

Afghanistan was a big turning point, Abed said. Near the end of 2001, once American troops had toppled the Taliban-led government, BRAC’s leadership heard stories that mirrored what had happened in Bangladesh — with Afghanistan’s infrastructure destroyed, the education system in tatters, a collapsed economy, and millions of refugees clamoring to return home.

BRAC could help. Its work in Bangladesh meant it could provide the expertise to rebuild education systems and health structures and provide financial services for people in postwar Afghanistan. This also suggests that BRAC’s model could be tested elsewhere.

BRAC now operates in 10 countries across Africa and Asia and plans to push into as many as 20, Abed said.

“Our theory of change is a relentless pursuit of scale,” he told Omar. “We don’t want to do things small. We don’t want to do things on the edges, and we don’t want to do things that look good, that are impactful, but only in very small doses and can’t be scaled.”

Read: Does BRAC offer a different model for development organizations?