by lwang | Jan 18, 2013 | Community Development, Education, FAWE, Female Empowerment, Poverty Reduction
At the Kravis Prize, we’re proud to honor those at the forefronts of their fields and exemplary leaders in the nonprofit community, knowing that their work has a tremendous impact on the larger world. In 1992, female education ministers of from five African countries established Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) to advocate for the education of girls across Africa. At the time, an estimated 24 million girls were out of school in sub-Saharan Africa and FAWE’s founders recognized not only the personal benefits for girls who attend school, but also the extensive benefits for society at large. Since then, FAWE has been a tireless and effective advocate for education, constantly innovating and implementing programs to address the multifaceted problems facing educators and students throughout the region. Among the group’s activities is co-chairing the annual GIMAC (“Gender is My Agenda Campaign”) Summit, which this year featured as keynote speaker the African Union’s first woman chair, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. All Africa contributor Samantha Nkirote Mckenzie reported on Dlamini-Zuma’s address during the summit’s first day, which focused on education: With the majority of Africa’s population being youth, there is a particular responsibility to ensure that the continent’s young people have the skills they need, Dlamini-Zuma said. “Education does not wait – it is a window that closes in time,” she said, underscoring the urgency of the situation. Several FAWE scholarship recipients attended the 21st annual summit, which also featured a welcoming address by FAWE Executive Director Oley Dibba-Wadda She said: “It is imperative that women and youth are supported and provided with the right tools so that they can engage and make...
by lwang | Jan 14, 2013 | Community Development, Education, Escuela Nueva, Vicky Colbert
Since founding the nonprofit educational organization Fundacion Escuela Nueva (FEN) 25 years ago to improve the quality and relevance of basic education in Colombia’s low-income schools, 2011 Kravis Prize winner Vicky Colbert has gained international acclaim as an educational innovator. The cornerstone of the world-renowned Escuela Nueva (“new school”) education model she co-authored is its Learning Guides – interactive tools that help children learn concepts through activities. As shown in this video, these educational tools promote collaborative learning and encourage reflection on the concepts being taught. This has a tremendous impact on students in low-income schools – and their teachers. In the coming weeks, FEN has announced that Learning Guides will be provided to nearly 200,000 students in need. Escuela Nueva Learning...
by lwang | Jan 8, 2013 | Community Development, Entrepreneurship, INJAZ Al-Arab, Soraya Salti
2012 Kravis Prize winner Soraya Salti has spent more than a decade mobilizing the private sector and ministries of education across the Arab world to join forces in creating a new generation of business-minded youth. All Africa News recently published an article by Salti regarding Egypt’s development potential under the country’s new government. In their article entitled, “Egypt: Harness the Youth to Create a Culture of Social Entrepreneurship,” Salti argues that the key to Egypt’s success is to invest in its young people. Salti formulates her argument around three divisions of Egyptian culture that have shaped the country’s identity: rising Internet usage, a large private sector economy, and the region’s most celebrated media industry. She provides the following statistical analysis to contextualize the country’s online mobility: “Magnified by the Arab Spring, millions of young Egyptians are now active on online platforms. As of June 2012, nearly 30 million Egyptians had access to Internet, a 30 percent penetration rate (Internetworldstats.com). Twenty-five percent of all Facebook users in the Arab World live in Egypt, and in 2012 it added more users than any other country in the region, 70 percent of whom were in the 15-29 age bracket (Dubai School of Government, 2012). On top of this, a recent study from the Dubai School of Government found that Arabs increasingly view social media as a tool for developing entrepreneurial skills and gaining productive knowledge. She continues by offering three examples of how to most effectively engage these principles into Egypt’s entrepreneurial culture. As the Regional Director for INJAZ Al-Arab, an organization that uses mentorship by Arab business leaders to inspire entrepreneurialism and innovation among Arab...
by lwang | Dec 14, 2012 | Community Development, Education, Escuela Nueva, Vicky Colbert
2011 Kravis Prize recipient, Vicky Colbert of Colombia, is a renowned innovator in the field of education. As the founder of Fundacion Escuela Nueva (FEN) and the co-author of the Escuela Nueva (or “new school”) model of education, Colbert has dedicated her life to improving the quality and relevance of basic education in schools that serve low- income students. Pearson Education, the world’s leading education company, recently launched a campaign to promote affordable learning, featuring Fundacion Escuela Nueva as a quality service provider in Colombia. In a case study on their website, Pearson Affordable Learning described the evolution of Escuela Nueva from a local initiative into a national policy in Colombia. According to Affordable Learning, this is “How it works”: In all programs, Fundación Escuela Nueva strives to improve the quality, efficiency and sustainability of rural and urban basic education, formal and informal. It does this by implementing the New School learning model which is cost effective, replicable and scalable. They work with students, teachers, educational administrators and communities to transform conventional schooling and the learning process. This is achieved through enhancing curriculum and classroom strategies through renovated teaching practices and experiential teacher training. We applaud Vicky Colbert for her continued success with the Escuela Nueva education model, and the Kravis Prize is proud to congratulate Colbert on being recognized by Pearson Education. To visit the Affordable Learning page and learn more about the FEN case study please visit:...
by lwang | Nov 30, 2012 | Community Development, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman, Sustainable Development
When President Obama made history by becoming the first U.S. president to visit Myanmar, he caught the attention of inaugural Kravis Prize winner Roy Prosterman. Prosterman founded Landesa to advocate for international land law and policy reform, and his latest contribution to Landesa’s Field Focus blog applauds President Obama’s remarks on the importance of land rights. Prosterman’s post noted that the president’s Nov. 19 speech at the University of Yangon drew a clear connection between the right to self-government and property rights – and the fact that the two together can help lead to prosperity. In his speech, the president said: “When ordinary people have a say in their own future, then your land can’t just be taken away from you. And that’s why reforms must ensure that the people of this nation can have that most fundamental of possessions—the right to own the title to the land on which you live and on which you work.” That notion is central to Landesa’s mission and its work, and Prosterman’s blog post asserts that securing farmers’ rights to the land they till and the crops they raise is key to fulfilling Myanmar’s agricultural promise and improving rural livelihoods: “If Myanmar does not protect the land rights of its largely rural citizenry who have labored for years in their fields with government control of their planting and marketing, and address the further issue of its large population of completely landless rural poor, it cannot build a solid foundation for sustainable development that will lift the country out of extreme poverty.” His post also quotes President Obama’s offer of assistance to Myanmar’s...
by lwang | Nov 9, 2012 | Community Development, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman, Sustainable Development
Inaugural Kravis Prize winner Roy Prosterman founded Landesa to apply his expertise in land reform, rural development and foreign aid to addressing the challenges of landlessness around the world. According to a recent article in Context China, Landesa has worked with the Chinese government since 1987, paying particular attention to state expropriation of farmland and compensation for farmers. The Ministry of Agriculture, among other organizations, has helped Landesa secure land ownership for nearly 86 million Chinese farming families. Context China contributor Wen Liu recently interviewed Prosterman about the organization’s work in China, including a discussion about what led attracted him to the country: Our work in China began in 1987, quite straightforwardly, because we saw initial publicity that China had broken up its collective farms and that agricultural production had substantially increased as a result. If this were true, we thought, it would be a striking instance of an erstwhile centrally planned economy of great size abandoning collective farming as a failure and replacing it as family farms, and we wanted to see it for ourselves. We did field work on this in 1987 (invited by the Foreign Affairs office of Sichuan province) and again, more extensively, in 1988 (invited by the Development Research Center of the State Council). The article highlights China’s sixth land rights survey, published by Landesa in 2011 and identifying the widespread problem of Chinese farming families lacking proper documentation of their land rights. Prosterman elaborated on the finding: Under the law, Chinese farm families are supposed to receive two documents confirming that they have 30 year rights to the small parcels of land that...
