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...
by lwang | Apr 11, 2013 | Community Development, Education, FAWE, Kravis Prize
Who can solve the problems facing under-developed communities in Africa? FAWE girls! 2008 Kravis Prize Winner FAWE is teaching African girls not only to improve their own lives, but also the lives of all of those around them. And the work has paid off: A team of students from FAWE’s Girls School in Rwanda just won a debate on good governance in Rwanda. The high school debate, run by the Rwanda Governance Board, was centered on the question of whether the “private sector has contributed more than the public sector in the economic development of less developed countries.” The Deputy Director General of the Rwanda Governance Board, Fatuma Ndagiza, complimented the quality of the debaters, saying that the candidates spoke “with confidence and clarity. They provided rich ideas and documented on key sectors of the country’s development.” FAWE isn’t the only Kravis Prize winner to have an impact on international education: Pratham USA was recently awarded a Social Impact award in the category of “International Contribution to India” from the Times of India. The organization was acknowledged for its work to improve the quality of education in India. RELATED: FAWE: Gender is My Agenda (GIMAC) Summit Escuela Nueva: Learning Guides in Action Egypt: Soraya Salti puts her money on Egypt’s youth...
by lwang | Mar 27, 2013 | Community Development, Female Empowerment, Landesa, Poverty Reduction
A garden grows more than vegetables. It also grows opportunities for women in impoverished Indian villages – that’s the message behind a pilot program developed by Landesa that’s the focus of a recent special report in the pages of the Sunday Seattle Times. That special report – titled “Seeds of Hope” – appears on the front-page of the newspaper’s March 16 edition and is devoted to Landesa’s program in West Bengal as well as to profiling Roy Prosterman, founder of the Seattle-based organization devoted to land access for the poor in India, China, Africa and other parts of the world. The Seattle Times visited the region and interviewed families whose lives have been affected by Landesa and Prosterman, the inaugural recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership in 2006. In particular, the special coverage examines the impact of teaching young women to garden and how this program’s goal transcends simply providing a useful skill. “The idea,” the article explains, “is that if [young women] are considered assets rather than extra mouths to feed, the girls might complete their educations and break out of the poverty cycle. Even if they do not, they will know how to grow food on even small plots of land, improving their nutrition and that of their future children.” An accompanying profile of Prosterman describes his many years of work as an advocate for land rights, from Central America and Africa to Asia and the Philippines. A law professor at the University of Washington, Prosterman told the Seattle Times reporter that he long ago realized that land ownership was the key to eradicating...
by lwang | Feb 11, 2013 | Community Development, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Tim Hanstad
More than 25 years after inaugural Kravis Prize winner Roy Prosterman founded Landesa to focus on one of the chief structural causes of global poverty – rural landlessness – Landesa’s current president and CEO was inspired to re-focus his approach to leading the organization at the Sundance Film Festival. Writing at the Huffington Post’s Social Entrepreneurship blog, Tim Hanstad shared how the festival offered him more than a glimpse of the year’s best independent films. It also showed him how to leverage storytelling to achieve large-scale social impact. In what he termed a “confession,” Hanstad described how the festival helped him better understand the origins of his own passion for the cause of land rights: As a data-driven leader, for years I have carried a prejudice against the value and power of storytelling, often thinking of stories as too anecdotal, bordering on the shallow. I thought a powerful story was a relaxing respite from metrics, serving more or less as a colorful parenthesis within an analytical argument. Yet through our discussions, I realized that my own calling to global poverty began not with data, but through hearing the stories of fellow agricultural day laborers, whom I worked beside as I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. You see, I trace my initial interest and motivation for working on global poverty issues to a summer when I was 10 years old, working in the berry fields along with Mexican migrant families. Interacting with the Mexican migrant children opened my eyes to social injustice – they worked so hard, yet had so little. They migrated with the harvests, moving from farm...
by lwang | Feb 1, 2013 | Community Development, Education, Pratham
Since its inception in 1994, Pratham, India’s largest non-governmental advocacy organization for quality education, has opened doors of opportunity for millions of underprivileged children. The Kravis Prize congratulates Pratham USA as this year’s winner of the Times of India Social Impact Award in the category of “International Contribution to India.” In a press release announcing the award, Pratham includes remarks by Arvind Sanger, chairman of Pratham USA’s board of directors. “This award not only recognizes the efforts of Pratham USA, but most importantly, it recognizes the continued generosity of our donors, both large and small…Every donor to Pratham USA has a strong belief that education provides the foundation for individuals to raise themselves socially and economically. Our donors understand that they have succeeded because of education and they want their resources to support the children of India in their own path to success.” The release details Pratham’s immense contribution to India’s future through its range of educational programs, as well as the organization’s annual research study that tracks the educational investment across the nation. “Pratham USA should serve as a model for many communities in the U.S. as they support global, social and economic transformations,” says Dr. Molly Easo Smith, Executive Director of Pratham USA. “The Indian American community understands the concept of organized and impact-focused philanthropy as a basis for significant social change globally.” We applaud Pratham USA on earning this prestigious award and trust their efforts to redefine educational quality in India will continue to receive the international acclaim it deserves. Please read the full press release...
by lwang | Jan 25, 2013 | Community Development, Female Empowerment, Health, m2m
Since 2001, the 2012 Kravis Prize recipient organization Mothers2Mothers has worked to improve the quality of life for thousands of HIV-infected women around the world. On the Huffington Post’s Global Motherhood blog, Mentor mother Nozi Samela discusses how she has helped hundreds of newly diagnosed pregnant women and mothers by sharing her own experience of living with the virus. Samela tells her story in three video blogs, with the Huffington Post providing the following summary of the first two segments: “Samela shared her despair after learning she was HIV- positive, the critical support and information she received from mothers2mothers to stay healthy and prevent transmission of HIV to her baby son, her devastation over the tragic death of her first son when he was three years old, and her excitement when she found out she was pregnant again.” Her most recent video blog, “The Greatest Gift,” concludes the series with the announcement of her HIV-free baby daughter. “Look at my baby,” Samela says, “and think to yourself, how wonderful it would be if all children born in Africa could be as healthy and as happy.” Click here to watch Nozi Samela’s full video...
