The economics of giving with economics professor and founder of Nourish Bangladesh, Muhammad Faress Bhuiyan

Season 3 - Episode 17: I take students to Bangladesh to learn
about development, and we see all the NGOs, we go to the rural
areas, and I'm always itching to do something. I mean, you do
read about these things in textbooks, you do a lot of research,
but there's something to be said about actually getting your
hands dirty and getting things done. And the real world is, may
sound like a cliche, but it is different than what the textbook
models are saying. It's not that the textbook models don't give
us some ideas, they do. They give us some general ideas over
decades of what what people have put together. But when you go
step out, and you try to implement things, you started realizing
some of those real world obstacles are real world realities. I
saw I saw a lot of poverty growing up, so I had to do something.


The other inspiration is obviously my students. I take them to
Bangladesh and we they go there for about two or three weeks. We
go to Bangladesh, we go to the villages we go talk to Professor
Yunus, we go talk to people in BRAC then we go talk to the actual
clients in the rural areas who are beneficiaries of their
projects. And the students, they want to do something, they're
young and they want to do something right away, they want to
enact change. And I always tell them be a fly on the wall, you're
here to learn You have to first learn the customs, the culture,
how things are. So whenever we come back, and then we have
another follow up course, where we make sense of what we read in
the books and what we saw on the ground. But this is once in 100
year thing, this pandemic doesn't happen every day in a country
like Bangladesh, no matter how we think about it, they're not
ready for this, nobody is us.


This year's flood was one of the worst in decades. And then
Bangladesh is a small country, they depend on trade, they really
depend on trade. They're part of the supply system in the world
as far as far as textile but also depend on stuff coming from
outside into the country, we don't have a lot of resources. So
when you think of that, it's a triple whammy. They're they're
getting really hit from all directions, they're getting hit by
flooding, they're getting hit by COVID-19, and they’re getting
hit by lack of resources. So this is as good a time as any, to
kind of do do some things, I'd say that would be my inspiration
in general.


Listen to the entire conversation with Economics Professor and
Founder of Nourish Bangladesh, Muhammad Faress
Bhuiyan, on the BoNY Podcast.


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