by nowchar | Feb 11, 2015 | Education, Kravis Prize, Poverty Reduction, Pratham
Are education efforts and outreach to children in rural India producing positive results? The answer is both encouraging and troubling, according to NGO Pratham’s 10th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), released this week in New Delhi. “While more than 96 percent of children in the 6-14 age group are attending school,” reports Indian media site IBN, Pratham’s analysis suggests that “there are still some worrying signs as reading and mathematical abilities are still not up to the mark.” Pratham was honored in 2010 with the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership for its literacy efforts throughout the country, particularly the program Read India, which has reached more than 34 million children. But as the organization’s latest ASER indicates, much work remains to be done even though the report presents substantial success. Among the findings announced this week: for the 6-14 age group, the percentage of children enrolled in schools across the nation remains at more than 96% for the sixth year in a row; the percentage of children not enrolled for that age group is 3.3% in older age groups, particularly for 15- and 16-year-olds, the number of children not enrolled in school jumps to much higher percentages: 15.9% for boys, 17.3% for girls simple reading and basic arithmetic skills continue to be “a serious and major source of concern,” with increases in various age groups of children struggling with number and character recognition daily attendance percentages for primary and upper primary schools continue to climb, which is a hopeful sign, as are improvements in facilities (availability of clean drinking water, toilets, equipment) which is improving the...
by lwang | Aug 29, 2014 | Civil Society, Community Development, Kravis Prize, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman
Say you find an old dollar bill in a pair of jeans … where does that dollar end up? Paying for your morning coffee? Carefully deposited in your bank account? What is the best way to invest a single dollar? Melissa Warnke, author of “Bang for Your Buck,” an article featured on The Morning News, interviews two dozen people—from a street performer to a head fund manager—about how they would invest a single dollar. Rena Singer, Communications Director of Landesa, a Rural Development Institute founded by Kravis Prize recipient Roy Prosterman, weighs in on the question. Singer outlines the way a dollar goes through Landesa’s Girls Project, a program which educates girls in West Bengal about “their rights to attend school, to not be married as a child, and to one day inherit land.” The project teaches girls the gardening skills needed to create and sustain a home—“a kitchen garden…roof of their house…food that boosts nutrition.” The program is a mere dollar per girl per year. Landesa was also recently named NGO of the Month by Funds for NGO’s. The organization is commended for their work to secure land for the world’s poorest populations and for their inspiring vision of “a world free of extreme poverty,” a vision which earned Prosterman the Kravis Prize in 2006. RELATED: More about the Kravis Prize at Claremont McKenna College A list of past recipients of the Kravis Prize ...
by lwang | Feb 24, 2014 | Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman
The following is a report from Roy Prosterman, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Landesa. For his work with Landesa, Mr. Prosterman was named the 2006 Recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership. Since our initial work on land tenure reform took place in what was then South Vietnam – accompanied by a 30% increase in rice yields and an 80% decline in Vietcong recruitment within the South – we have continued to follow with interest any major land-law developments in post-conflict Vietnam. (You may recall that Tim and I were invited back by the Hanoi government in 1993 to do fieldwork and provide an independent confirmation that collective farming had been ended in favor of a system of individual family farms, and that farmers were indeed pleased and more productive under the family-farming regime.) At the time of the 1993 fieldwork, Vietnam had just adopted a new Land Law which gave farmers 20-year rights on land used for annual crops, and 50-year rights on land used for perennial crops such as tree crops. Following our fieldwork, and in light of farmers’ general response, “the longer the better” as to how long they would like their land rights to be, we recommended a regime of permanent use rights for all agricultural land. This issue of the length of farmers’ land property rights has continued to be on the policy agenda in the unified Vietnam, and we are pleased to report that we have just learned from the Government’s English-language website that Vietnam has now adopted a Revised Land Law, to become effective on July 1, 2014, which...
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 | 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...
