by akate | Apr 29, 2015 | BRAC, Helen Keller International
Our thoughts are with Nepal right now as it reels in the aftermath of the 7.8-magnitude quake that rocked through the Kathmandu valley early Saturday morning. With death tolls mounting and tremors felt as far away as Bangladesh and some parts of India, the scale and destruction of this earthquake is tremendous. At the same time, we are constantly in awe of our Kravis Prize recipients as they leap to action in support of relief efforts worldwide. Kravis Prize recipient organizations are often the first on the frontlines and have the ability to mobilize their people quickly and efficiently in response to these disasters. We were reminded of this with Helen Keller International’s presence in West Africa last year during the Ebola breakout, and are humbled once again by the rapid response of BRAC in responding to the current emergency that is unfolding in Nepal. In a message that went out Monday from the BRAC team, they stated that they would be sending a team of their staff to provide 5,000-10,000 blankets, medical treatment, medicine, and food to earthquake victims. “Our core team will provide essential medical support to the victims in collaboration with the Nepalese government,” said Shahinul Hoque Ripon, a doctor from BRAC who will lead the team. Please consider supporting BRAC in their emergency response efforts as they lend a hand to a neighbor in need. Helen Keller International is also working in Nepal and merits your...
by lwang | Jan 9, 2015 | BRAC, Helen Keller International, Kravis Leadership Institute, Kravis Prize
The Kravis Prize team would like to extend warm wishes for a Happy New Year to all of the members of the Kravis Prize and Claremont McKenna College communities. We look forward to kicking off the spring semester at CMC with a number of exciting upcoming events. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership at CMC, an important milestone that we will celebrate in April alongside another important event: the twentieth anniversary of the College’s Kravis Leadership Institute. In recognition of these events, we are so excited to host the past ten Kravis Prize recipient organizations, including early recipients like Fazle Abed’s Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (pictured above) as well as more recent ones like Helen Keller International (decorated for the holidays, pictured below) for their upcoming retreat as we welcome them back to Claremont McKenna College. DON’T FORGET: Students who are interested in having social impact during their undergraduate years should remember: The Kravis Prize team is looking forward to welcoming student applications for partnered summer internship positions with past recipient organizations. Deadlines for these applications are February 2, 2015 (for international internships) and March 2, 2015 (for domestic internships). For more information on the application process, please go to the embedded link here. Or see our recent posts on the Kravis Prize blog for more information. CURRENT PRIZE UPDATE: At the moment, the Kravis Prize is moving along the selection process and we look forward to announcing the eleventh recipient of the $250,000 Prize soon! Stay in the loop, follow us on social media Facebook, Twitter, and...
by nowchar | Oct 22, 2014 | BRAC, BRAC UK, BRAC USA, Fazle Abed, Kravis Prize
Once a program has been successfully implemented, the work isn’t over: It’s only just begun. That was the message brought this fall by Sir Fazle Abed to New Haven, Connecticut, where he addressed a group of students in the Yale School of Management. One of the more crucial aspects of any NGO project is its sustainability factor, said Abed, who became the second recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership in 2007 (the first was Landesa’s Roy Prosterman in 2006). If sustainability isn’t tested and confirmed, longterm success on a much larger scale will be harder to achieve. “We make the programs effective first, then we want to make them efficient by routinizing tasks that are essential and discarding those which are not essential,” he told students during a lecture as part of Yale School of Management’s Leaders Forum Series. “Then, we can scale up.” Abed founded the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in 1972 to address poverty in remote parts of Bangladesh. That mission has grown to touch lives in so many other areas as well — Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Uganda, Tanzania, Southern Sudan — largely because BRAC has been careful to do exactly what Abed described for his Yale audience. Thanks to a research division, BRAC has been able to test and assess every micro-finance, educational reform, and women’s empowerment program for strengths and weaknesses before scaling up these efforts. Such testing can be costly, however, which is why BRAC has also developed social enterprises (micro lending, printing presses, craft shops, schools) to generate funding that enables BRAC to support new projects. In fact, charitable...
by lwang | Apr 23, 2014 | BRAC, BRAC UK, BRAC USA, Civil Society, Fazle Abed, Kravis Prize
Who are the world’s 50 greatest leaders, according to Fortune Magazine? Along with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and actress-activist Angelina Jolie, Fazle Abed has been honored as one of the world’s “50 greatest leaders” by the magazine for turning the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) into a major force for social change in the non-profit, social sector. Abed was awarded the second annual Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership in 2007 for his visionary work with BRAC and its expansion from serving the poor in northeastern Bangladesh to helping more than 130 million around the world. Fortune Magazine identified the 77-year-old Abed, who was knighted in 2010, as an inspiring figure who is “making the world better.” “After Bangladesh fought a war to become independent,” Fortune magazine announces, “Abed, 77, established the Brac to aid the rural poor, including 10 million returning refugees.” Abed (pictured above), according to the magazine report, is the lone Bangladeshi to make the top 50 list. Abed ranks at #32 on the Fortune list. Other figures included in the top 50 list are Pope Francis, investor Warren Buffett, and former U.S. president Bill Clinton. RELATED: BBVA Award goes to Pratham Nonprofit management: Focus on “funamentals, not fads”: Kravis Prize-related article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review...
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 | Apr 16, 2013 | BRAC, Civil Society, Community Development, Kravis Prize
Have you ever heard of frugal innovation? That’s what happens when you help improve people’s lives but have a limited budget—an all-too-familiar situation for the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. The 2007 recipient of the Kravis Prize, BRAC and its founder Fazle Abed have turned such limitations into a powerful learning tool by staging a Frugal Innovation Forum in March. Asif Saleh, senior director of BRAC Strategy, Communications, and Capacity, shared some of the lessons of this forum in a recent article in Forbes magazine. The reason for the BRAC forum was a simple principle: By providing a venue for the exchange of ideas, you increase the reach and possibility of individual organizations with limited means. It’s an old, familiar idea that novelist E.M. Forster once expressed perfectly in two words in his novel “Howard’s End” — Only connect. When organizations in the non-profit sector connect and share ideas, solutions to common problems can be found far more easily than when these organizations face them alone. As BRAC’s Saleh writes in Forbes: It’s easy to pay lip service to the need to learn from one other, but actually how one does that is not entirely understood. Rarely can a ready-made model be dropped into a new place. Even the process of creation is hugely important in developing a sophisticated understanding of not just what works, but why it works. “Everyone needs to reinvent the wheel,” wrote Madhav Chavan, founder of Pratham, an incredible Indian organization transforming education nationally, “it’s important because all of us need our own kind of wheel.” Among the other lessons that Saleh passes along? It’s important to...
