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 16, 2012 | Education, Poverty Reduction, Pratham
Pratham, the 2010 Kravis Prize recipient, is a renowned leader in the field of education, and frequently praised for presenting innovative, low-cost solutions for mass literacy and numeracy in the developing world. The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) recently announced Pratham CEO and co-founder, Madhav Chavan as this year’s winner of the WISE Prize for Education. According to an article in MarketWatch, the WISE award was established in 2010 to recognize “world-class” contributions to education. This prestigious accomplishment reflects Chavan’s dedication to social justice, and his application of years of scientific training to develop systems that revolutionize access to education in the world’s most impoverished areas. “Just like you need air, just like you need water, just like you need food, you need education,” he has said. The WISE announcement singles out Pratham’s work in the slums of Mumbai, noting that its students perform at a higher level than other children in their age group. Chavan and the Pratham team have long been winners to us, and the Kravis Prize is proud to congratulate them on this latest recognition. 2012 WISE Prize for Education Award to Madhav Chavan [MarketWatch, November 13,...
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...
by lwang | Sep 28, 2012 | BRAC, Education, Fazle Abed, Poverty Reduction, Sustainable Development
Isn’t it remarkable how one individual can transform an entire country? Kravis Prize winner Sir Fazle Hasan Abed can most definitely be credited for Bangladesh’s tremendous progress over the last 40 years as the founder of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), the largest nongovernmental development organization in the world. The Asia Foundation’s Alma Freeman — blogger for In Asia, a weekly insight and analysis from the foundation — had the privilege of sitting down with the 2007 Kravis Prize winner to discuss the changes he has witnessed in Bangladesh and his goals for the future. “The most dramatic change has been women’s role in society. Women’s literacy rate used to be almost 30 percent less than men, now it’s almost equal. It has been wonderful to see so many children being educated…I can see that BRAC has changed people’s lives dramatically, particularly for those children who have had the advantage of education.” Based on the prediction that Bangladesh will become a middle-income country by 2021, Abed remarks: “If a country attains middle-income status, and 10 percent of the population is still under extreme poverty, if they can’t feed themselves and their children, then it doesn’t mean much to me… Bangladesh has done well, but that doesn’t mean that we have attained all of the things that we still want to do with our country.” To learn more about the inspiring work of Sir Fazle Abed and BRAC, go to our page. “In Conversation with BRAC’s Sir Fazle Hassan Abed”[The Asia Foundation, September 19,...
by lwang | Aug 30, 2012 | BRAC, Fazle Abed, Poverty Reduction, Sustainable Development
Kravis Prize winners are always innovating to help solve pressing problems in today’s world. For example, BRAC, founded by 2007 Kravis Prize winner Sir Fazle Abed, has reworked microfinance to create a new “graduation model.” The groundbreaking model was featured in Live Mint: “The model targets the ultra-poor and initiates a multi-pronged intervention with them, typically comprising mandatory savings, a subsistence allowance, transfer of a productive asset (usually livestock), health and livelihood trainings, etc. The basic idea is to provide the ultra-poor a safety net and an opportunity to start thinking of savings and investment in some form of productive livelihood activities.” Since BRAC introduced this program, the graduation pilots have been replicated in multiple sites around the world, “as an intervention to reach out to the poorest of the poor with a time-bound investment aimed at providing a social safety net and building their productive capacities.” The model has been adapted and implemented in eight countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, Yemen and India. Through continuous evaluation, researchers are monitoring the impact of the graduation pilots. In fact, researchers studying the pilot in West Bengal found that per capita food consumption increased 15 percent; per capita income increased 20 percent, while income from livestock and agriculture also showed significant gains. According to the research, there is an impressive 27 percent rate of return on the program investments! To learn more about the amazing work of Sir Fazle Abed and BRAC, go to our page. “The ‘graduation model’ in microfinance.” [Live Mint, August 14,...
by lwang | Aug 24, 2012 | Community Development, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman
In the mid 1960s, inaugural Kravis Prize winner Roy Prosterman, armed with his legal knowledge and expertise, set out to change the world. This led to the establishment of Landesa in 1981, which tackles one of the chief structural causes of global poverty, rural landlessness, by educating people around the world about land rights. In the past 25 years, Landesa has expanded and truly has a global impact. In fact, Dawn recently published an article by Prosterman and Landesa senior attorney Darryl Vhugen, who discussed the importance of upholding land rights in Pakistan: An estimated 4.7 million rural families, comprising around 33 million people, are completely landless across rural Pakistan. Their lack of land rights leaves them with no pathway to escape their deep poverty – no land on which to labour for their own reward, and no opportunity to exercise any entrepreneurial spirit. The authors introduced the idea of house-and-garden plots, which would give the recipient families a “land base” that would allow them to “literally grow themselves out of abject poverty.” “[House-and-garden plots] provide enough space for a family to build a very small house and engage in vegetable gardening, tree cultivation, small-scale raising of livestock, home-based businesses and other income-generating activities. They can make a very large difference in the livelihoods and status of the poor — including the enhancement of the role and status of women, whose names should be included on the title wherever possible — while supplementing and diversifying existing livelihood strategies. … They increase family income, enhance family nutrition, provide physical security, help assure access to a range of government benefits, serve...
