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

Bengalis of New York

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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