Food for Thought: Tamara Hasan Abed on Innovation Through Social Enterprise
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Tamara Hasan Abed, Managing Director, BRAC Enterprises—the social enterprise arm of BRAC, the world’s largest development organization—shared insights into BRAC’s history and the vital role of social enterprise in driving inclusive development. Abed oversees BRAC’s diverse portfolio of enterprises, including Aarong, BRAC Dairy, and Seed & Agro, which grew out of an opportunity to connect people with commercial markets. Today, this portfolio of social enterprises serves as engines of financial sustainability and social impact, with surpluses reinvested into operations and BRAC’s social programs.
With extensive experience in investment banking, entrepreneurship, and social enterprise, and a career spanning over two and a half decades, she is passionate about driving value-based business models, operating at the intersection of social good, sustainable business and inclusive growth. In addition, she chairs the Board of Trustees at BRAC University, a leading center of knowledge and innovation in Bangladesh.
In a fireside chat with Professor Charles Eesley, whose research explores entrepreneurship in contexts ranging from Silicon Valley to refugee communities in Africa, Abed reflected on the intersection of education, innovation, and enterprise in building pathways to equitable growth.
About the Speakers:
Tamara Hasan Abed, Managing Director at BRAC Enterprises
Tamara Hasan Abed is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and leader whose work is deeply interwoven with BRAC’s mission-driven enterprise. The eldest daughter of BRAC founder Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, she holds a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School. After launching her career in investment banking—first with Peregrine Capital in Dhaka and later with Goldman Sachs in New York—she returned to Bangladesh and joined BRAC’s social enterprise arm in 2002, taking on expanding leadership across design, retail, agriculture, dairy, and allied businesses.
Within BRAC, Abed has grown to oversee its portfolio of social enterprises—ranging from Aarong (the handicraft retail chain) to BRAC Dairy, Seed & Agro, and more. She has served on numerous boards of BRAC’s commercial and social enterprises, including BRAC Bank (2008–2016), BRAC University (as Chair of its Board of Trustees), BRAC Enterprises, BRAC IPDC, and investment subsidiaries. Abed has also been recognized internationally: In 2010 she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and she has received awards such as Outstanding Women Leadership from the World Women Leadership Congress.
Charles Eesley, Faculty Affiliate at the King Center on Global Development
Charles “Chuck” Eesley is a professor and W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and is a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center for AI Safety. His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, and platform governance, with recent projects examining how AI/ML algorithms shape opportunity access, entrepreneurial performance, and the financing and spread of misinformation online. More broadly, his work explores how institutional and university environments influence high-growth, engineering-driven entrepreneurship, with a focus on how education and policy can better support economic and entrepreneurial outcomes for students and alumni. His research methods range from randomized field experiments to machine learning and platform development, as in the case of NovoEd.com, a company spun out of his and Prof. Amin Saberi’s Venture Lab at Stanford.
Eesley’s fieldwork has taken him from Silicon Valley to China, Japan, South Korea, Chile, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Thailand. His scholarship has been recognized with awards from the Schulze Foundation, the Technical University of Munich, and the Kauffman Foundation, as well as a Stanford Social Impact Labs Design Fellowship for his work training refugee entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eesley has been a mentor and advocate for immigrants, rural communities, and first-generation, low-income students in STEM. He earned his PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BS in neuroscience from Duke University.
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