by lwang | Oct 31, 2013 | Escuela Nueva, Kravis Prize, Vicky Colbert
“Without quality education, nothing can be achieved,” says Vicky Colbert, founder/director of Escuela Nueva, in a video honoring her selection as the 2013 recipient of the Wise Prize for Education. Colbert, who received the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership in 2011, was chosen because of her organization’s long efforts to improve education in Colbert’s native Colombia. Colbert received the award during the fifth World Innovation Summit for Education held in Qatar. The announcement of Colbert’s award also includes the following video: RELATED LINKS: Pratham Books is a contender for a Google Impact Award For more on the World Innovation Summit for...
by lwang | Oct 23, 2013 | Education, Entrepreneurship, Kravis Prize, Pratham
Google’s Global Impact Awards are honoring the powerful ways that tech produces substantial, positive outcomes in the lives of communities around the world. A program related to Kravis Prize recipient Pratham is among 10 nominees for this year’s award as part of the Google Impact Challenge initiative. While three winners will be determined by a panel of judges, a fourth winner will be based on an internet-wide vote. The deadline for voting is October 30. Go here to cast your vote. The Global Impact Challenge is an award program providing help to Indian non-profits that are targeting some of that nation’s most serious problems. Among this year’s candidates are several employing digital tools to address situations including sanitation in India’s slums, gender-based violence, and education in rural areas. Pratham Books, which fits under the umbrella of efforts by Pratham (recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership in 2010), is under award consideration for its development of an easy access web platform to support children’s literacy throughout the country. According to their proposal, reading levels fall far below satisfactory standards — “Nearly 50% of Indian 5th graders currently read at a 2nd grade level” — and this dire problem is largely due to a lack of available age-appropriate reading materials. With the help of a Global Impact Award, Pratham Books will construct an open source website where children’s e-books can be created and existing children’s books from around the world can be translated into at least 25 languages. “The word Pratham means ‘first’ or ‘priority,’ and we think that having every child in school and learning well should be...
by lwang | Jul 22, 2013 | Johann Olav Koss, Kravis Prize, Right 2 Play
Olympic gymnast Gabrielle Douglas and two fellow U.S. gymnasts have signed on as Athlete Ambassadors with Right To Play, an organization founded by Olympic speed skater Johann Olav Koss to help disadvantaged children around the world. Koss and his organization are this year’s recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership. Koss visited Claremont McKenna College in April to receive the award from its founders, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis ’67. Douglas, a member of “The Fierce Five” who won a team gold medal at the Summer Olympics held in London last year, will serve as a Right To Play ambassador along with Olympic gymnasts and medalists Jonathan Horton and Alicia Sacramone, Right To Play announced earlier this month in a press release. The announcement is part of a new, larger partnership between Right To Play and USA Gymnastics to bring the same kind of support to U.S. youth that Right To Play has been bringing to other countries since it was established in 2000. “There is no doubt in my mind that this partnership can make a positive difference in the lives of disadvantaged youth in the United States,” said Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics. “Gymnastics teaches the value of physical activity and many of the life skills needed to be healthy and achieve success.” Koss added that his organization is “honored” and “excited” about a new effort “bridging disadvantaged communities in the U.S. with opportunities to experience sport and play specifically through gymnastics.” The partnership is slated to extend through 2016. Douglas said she is excited to join Horton and Sacramone in inspiring children and...
by lwang | Jul 18, 2013 | BRAC, BRAC UK, BRAC USA, Civil Society, Fazle Abed, Kravis Prize
Central European University has awarded the 18th Open Society Prize to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and chairperson of BRAC, recipient of the Kravis Prize in 2007, and the affiliated BRAC University, at its commencement ceremony in June. The Open Society Prize, which is given “to an outstanding individual whose achievements have contributed substantially to the creation of an open society,” has been awarded at past ceremonies to a multitude of prominent world figures, including: Sir Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and its Enemies; Vaclav Havel, playwright and former president of the Czech Republic; Richard Holbrooke, the late senior U.S. diplomat; and Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations. During his acceptance speech, Abed described his early experiences with BRAC and reflected on the lessons that he has learned along the way with the organization: “After my country’s independence, I began working to try to help the poor of Bangladesh. My early colleagues and I initially thought that BRAC would be a short-term relief effort. But the realities of entrenched poverty soon changed our minds. I have learned much along the way. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that when you create the right conditions, poor people will do the hard work of defeating poverty themselves.” RELATED: Landesa offers perspectives on China’s changing...
by lwang | Jul 3, 2013 | Kravis Prize, Landesa, Roy Prosterman
What is happening in China? When China unveiled its plan to urbanize over 250 million rural Chinese over the next dozen years, prestigious news outlets turned to Landesa, whose founder Roy Prosterman was 2009 Kravis Prize winner, for its expertise on land-rights issues. In “China’s Great Uprooting,” an article that is part of a series by The New York Times on that nation’s changing identity, Gao Yu, the China country director for Landesa, offered commentary to the news outlet on some major concerns regarding China’s program. Gao first spoke on the impulse to modernize, noting how “[t]here’s this feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is our national-development strategy.” The speed of the development campaign is also a cause for concern as Gao Yu compares it, in the article, to the disastrous Maoist campaign in the 1950s: “It’s almost like another Great Leap Forward.” That said, the new policy could also prevent local governments from forcibly taking over rural land. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, local officials provide limited compensation to the farmers, and then sell long-term leases to factory owners and real estate developers. Li Ping, senior attorney at the Beijing office of Landesa, spoke on the motivations of local governments in an interview with Bloomberg: “Local governments have an incentive to push this distorted urbanization, to grab all that profit.” The modernization policy would increase the involvement of the federal government, which would remove and organize the incentives of the local government urbanization plans. As China’s ambitious agenda begins to be implemented, it is unclear whether it will be successful or damaging to that country’s future but...
