singapore award omsad south asian diaspora, nus - isas

 The Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research body at the National University of Singapore, presented Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, KCMG, founder and chair emeritus of BRAC, with the Outstanding Member of the South Asian Diaspora Award (OMSAD). The honour was given at a gala dinner organised at the Shangri-La Hotel on Friday, November 15, in Singapore.

Manzoor Hasan OBE, executive director, Centre for Peace and Justice at BRAC University, accepted the award on behalf of Sir Fazle. Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, former foreign adviser to the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh and currently a principal research fellow at ISAS, read the citation of the award.

ISAS organised the event as part of its two-day South Asian Diaspora Convention 2019, concluding today. The theme of the convention is “Vibrant South Asia – Innovative Diaspora”. The Bangladesh High Commission in Singapore is one of the organisations supporting the convention.

Dignitaries from the governments of Singapore and other South Asian nations, academia, researchers and civil society and private sector were present at the gala dinner.

Gopinath Pillai, ambassador-at-large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore, and chairman of ISAS, said, “Sir Fazle’s efforts in leading BRAC helped change the lives of many across the world. His contributions to social development and his life’s mission to help the poor serve as an inspiration to the South Asian diaspora and the society at large,” he added.

Past recipients of this award include former Singapore president late SR Nathan.

According to its website, the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) was established in 2004, as an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore. ISAS is dedicated to research on contemporary South Asia. It seeks to promote understanding of this vital region of the world and to communicate knowledge and insights about it to policymakers, the business community, academia and civil society, in Singapore and beyond

SHELF - safety health education loveq-leaders finance

book sampler



 2019 (8)

• ▼  December (1)
  • SHELF - safety health education loveq-leaders finance

• ►  November (1)
• 5e's franchise effective efficient expandable elec...

• ►  October (1)
• VESTY -1960S top 5 solution spaces - for human development/united nations
• Village-
  Engineering smarter
  Satellites & space communications -
  Tech offering 100 times more analytic power every decade from late 1960s
  Youth can achieve mission impossible goals eg moon race if humanity cheers them on - imagine world series of earth races as exciting as moon landing

• ►  September (1)
• 5g leapfrogs

• ►  August (1)
• 5factor sdgs

• ►  July (1)
• 5er trading maps and 21st c sustainability economics

• ►  June (1)
• UNITS -university nature infrastructure tech sports 5 transformations needed to prevent middle income trap

• ►  May (1)

sSafetyHealthEducationLoveFinance

Safety. a million people were killed 3 times in first 4 years of fazle abed's 50 years serving poverty alleviation- million people killed in 48 hour cyclone 1970 million people killed in war of independence 1971 million people die of famine 1974 hence safety is the key value chain of brac - dimensions included resilient communities, local food security, personal safety as integral to empowering mothers and children- basic to brac's bottom-up approach- maximising community skill building in every intervention- for example when sir fazle moved back to bangladesh 1972 with 16000 pounds from selling his london flat, the first project involved bottom up disaster relief- building tens of thousands of monsoon proof one room dwellings with pit latrines attached- in doing so unlike traditional relief agencies that come in fix a disaster and then fly out, brac saw hut building as organic opportunity to train villagers-from that day on look at every innovation in the community that brac evolves in terms of livelihood education of villagers as well as progressing family and community sustainability

.Health- between 1970 and 1973 sir fazle transitioned his life's purpose from shell oil regional ceo to bottom up disaster relief to serving in-community human development- from the moment brac -bangladesh rural advancement committee - turned to human development, fazle focused on village mothers and children because it was women who spent all their time in the village while young men were often sent to city or abroad to remit funds back to the village- what affordable health solutions in villages with no electricity could women living in the village operate to raise life expectancy from 40 to 60- fortunately this life expectancy question had 2 immediate types of answers - borlaug alumni had advanced local village crop science solution so that there need be no more famine nor malnutrition of infants during the first 1000 days- stunting stops not just an infant's bodily growth but causes her brain to underdevelop- thats why brac needed to design agricultural microfranchises that village mothers could operate; health solutions turned out to begin with oral rehydration - up to a quarter of under 5s died of diarrhea ; abed identified ten most basic village diseases that para-health workers could microfranchise then came nartion-wide immunisation ...in all of these village needs, women villagers in south china nreded similar solutions- the miracle of a billion women villagers building a rural nation became a sino-bangladeshi pursuit through friendships sir fazle formed- basically this open source peer to peer networking of life critical knowhow

.Education - every stall member of brac i have met is an educator forst as well as often bring another deep functional expertise- oral rehydration became an education program that reached out to hundreds of thousands of villages all taught peer to peer; microfranchise solutions involved training to operate the franchise as a positive cash flow business- once mothers had started to thrive they united to demand brac build village primary schools for their kids- sit fazle's passion as a livelihood educator - brac's dna which he built around brazilian paulo freiere's pedagogy of the oppressed- led through all 50 years of abed's service to constant questioning of whee in the ducationage chain could brac partner next from pre-childhood to university; regarding primary and pre-primary schools brac became the largest non government supplier

LoveqLeadership -exercise search for the quote in shakespeare that has the most meaning to you in the age of covid and livesmatter- free yourself to change one word if necessary -related reference comparison of abed, mandela, gandhi  - eg the quality of LEADERSHIP is not strained (note pope francis is on the money when he asks the eu parliament what is the intergenerational value of mercy but for many westerners leadership is a more common term that needs transformational re-examination wherever 21st c teachers study and curious students teach ). Its sad but not a shock that the continent of americas and indeed any place dependent on it relationship with washington has become a highly risky lab for resolving corona and livesmatter) , i spent my 1980s helping mit collect a database with thousands of cases on what did societies around the world want from the biggest branded corporations. when a bad leader name of robert maxwell bought out our market modeling analysis, i turned to exponentially the biggest maths problem of local to global sustainability- what happens when analytic professions - eg accounting, insurance, lawyering, valuation, tax , business process engineering, intangibles) lose their hippocratic oath by making the biggest or most powerful their core clients instead of the publics whose trust gave them the monopoly to rule. since 1990 i have worked in world's largest ad agencies, accountants social media searching for the most purposeful collaborative and empowering systems and leaders- the sort needed to value frontline service workers, or resolve locally lives matter conflicts) instead of trying to convince you that fazle abed is the benchmark for valuing the fifth capital love as integral to the other 4 intellectual, social, human and monetary. we offer a handful of life in one-hour transcripts in his own words or those who linked in most deeply with women lifting up half the sky to innovated huge leaps with technology empowering the poorest or most abused which historically hum,d and continental asia became the lab for valuing/freeing poorest women rising partly because of how the top-down british empire ruled and naturally because without access to electricity brute force is key to survival of landlocked peoples, which through millennium 2 had also spun a collision of different faiths where quite frankly those at the west end of eurasia designed round a golden rule cause more short-term aggression and misjudgement than those osmosing natural consciousness and familial love

.Finance -if we dehine the deepest goal of the human race as - desiging a world in which every next baby born has a great chance in life then we need very community to be a thriving place to be born into- the simplest logic then suggests we need finance where most or all of the productivity of workers in the community stays in that community- we can see that is the core way in which a microfranchise service model differs from a macrofranchise one - more at the 5e's and the 5 depths of a local to worldwide economy please note: there is nothing more worthy of transparent research/understaning than a positive income business model provided 1 it is a multi-win model not one where one side is extracting from all the others evey quarter; also to be sustainable the model should be compounding no harm on anyone be that your places future generation (eg failure to address green issues just ahead of time) or peoples in other places in the sense we have definded the human race's goal 1, please note all lives matter; in 2020 americans need to recognise the triple failure of their public servants and busines is constiution which 1 spun underclasses including black , latin and female ; 2 in which about 12 different components of health services were maximising profits not building last mile health services of all - with the absurd result of spending over twice other developed nations on health but with a system that wasnt gettin better or safer for more and more people; look too at americans biggest pharmas profits of 2010s these were coming from focusing on causing opiod addiction not preventing epidemics; there remains very little the younger half of the world can learn from americans on climate innovations because in spite of claiming to be the world's financial superpower this area has not been valued by politicians nor ameriuca's biggest energy companies; and as always when a nation spins non-sustinable big businesses the warning signs come in local communities typically those least connected with the harm some wealthy community was spinning  a deep problem with all of the shelf "markets" as services is that customers who are not the poorest, not with least access to health or educaqtion, demand separation from those who face the most extreme sustainability challenges. for example in bangladesh one of the biggest challenges was how the less poor villagers had become the loan sharks or effectively slave owners of the poorest girls). for this reason brac had to create barefoot lawyers as well as barefoot bankers as wel as barefoot medics and barefoof teachers.

the more fazle abed's life work is studied- the more his observation- at a basic level the poorest in humid villages across asia need similar solutions is evident - whether you try extending the microfranchise asw normal marketrs do, or you insist on random trial proof as fazle abed's work on ultra poverty has been acadically reseached- even getting acadeimncs a nobel economis prize

the obvious question is why didnt india adopt brac solutions especially those ones in village schooling that were based a lot on gandhi- montessor work of the 1930s; the answer is not realy about different faith cultures; it goes bac to the fact that when bangladesh started as a new nation in 191 it was so poor the government barely had enough revenues to serve the cities; if brac hadnt been their to support vilage networks from 1972 there would have been no vilager development at the same time that eg the chinese were applying the same american knowledge sources such as borlaug to end famine

over in idia by this time there was a quater of a century of inheriting the top down democracy structure that had been passed on by the british- in other words the fact thaty the indian government started with a budget for the whole country never gave bottom up india a chance to blossom in spite of this being the legacy gandhi had hoped his succession would value

as you can see if you cross-examine all 7 frameworks, the likelihood that any peoples faced by a deep sdg challenge could gain by saeing what benchmark abeed offers does not in iself resolve problems caused by a national constitution not being founded around all lives matter- rather than use some of fazle abed's most exciting innovations to keep making this point, this books appendix offers transripts - one hours in the life of fazle abed where you can see how he sequenced a next innovation and make you own assessment whtrher your nations legislature would have been legally supportive of such an entrepreneurial intervention