Mass poverty is an intractable reality in Pakistan and much of the world. Poverty reduction programs are urgently needed and microfinance institutions are a real lifeline for the poor. Yet, though Pakistan is in a region that is a global center of the microfinance movement, about fifty million Pakistanis still live below the national poverty line. Clearly, much more work remains to be done.

One organization and its founder are breaking fresh ground in the fight against poverty. MUHAMMAD AMJAD SAQIB, sixty-four years old and highly educated, has worked as a consultant on social development for Pakistan’s government and international development organizations. In 2001, SAQIB invited a group of friends (all successful professionals and businessmen) to present to them his plan for a first-of-its-kind interest-free microfinance program, offering to design, organize, and implement it. Enthusiastic, his friends pledged their support, and funds were raised to capitalize the project. Two years later, Akhuwat was formed and its first branch opened in Lahore.

The most interesting aspect of Akhuwat is its concept and philosophy. Akhuwat (brotherhood or sisterhood) is an approach to poverty alleviation that SAQIB introduced based on the values of the Islamic tradition of Mawakhat that has for its core the Prophet Mohammed’s teaching: that if one has a loaf of bread, half of it rightly belongs to a person who has none. Related to this is the idea that charging interest (riba) on a loan is un-Islamic, hence the practice of the “benevolent loan” which, SAQIB reminds us, was already there in early human societies. “We just institutionalized it,” SAQIB says. Akhuwat uses places of worship for loan disbursements, saving on costs and instilling the sense of trust, responsibility and community that a mosque, church, or temple creates. It also promotes volunteerism among staff and clients; aims at transforming borrowers into donors; and fosters diversity and inclusion, serving all—irrespective of religion, caste, color, and gender.

All these have proved to be a winning formula. Today, Akhuwat is the largest microfinance institution in Pakistan, offering a package of loans for the poor. It has distributed 4.8 million interest-free loans amounting to the equivalent of USD900 million, helping three million families, with a remarkable 99.9% loan repayment rate.

Its phenomenal growth has fueled Akhuwat’s social support programs in fields like education, where, in partnerships with government and others, Akhuwat has “adopted” hundreds of neglected and non-functioning public schools and established four residential colleges (one of them for women), and soon a university, for poor and deserving students.   Akhuwat runs a health services program, helping hundreds of thousands of patients; a “clothes bank” that has distributed more than three million clothes for the needy; and a program of economic, health, and psycho-social services for the discriminated khwaja sira (transgender) community. In the Covid-19 pandemic, Akhuwat responded with emergency loans and grants, food relief, and other assistance in over a hundred cities in Pakistan.

People were skeptical about the sustainability of a no-interest, no-collateral loan program (one that only asks a borrower for a USD1.26 application fee and an optional mutual support contribution of 1.0% of the loan amount). SAQIB is not worried. The Prophet’s story of the loaf of bread, the call for empathy and solidarity, has inspired him and stirred many donors to help. SAQIB has succeeded not only because of his expertise in this field but because he embraced the work of helping the poor as a call to faith. Empathy and optimism in human goodness are central to his work. He says: “Akhuwat is a philosophy. It is now a mission of millions. Until a poverty-free society has been created, we won’t let go. As long as there is an element of good and empathy in society, Akhuwat will continue.”

In electing MUHAMMAD AMJAD SAQIB to receive the 2021 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes the intelligence and compassion that enabled him to create the largest microfinance institution in Pakistan; his inspiring belief that human goodness and solidarity will find ways to eradicate poverty; and his determination to stay with a mission that has already helped millions of Pakistani families.

1963, Akhtar Hameed Khan. 1992, Sultan Shoaib Khan.  And now in 2021, I have joined my mentors and fellow countrymen in receiving Asia’s most prestigious award. I am truly humbled.

I am no more than a torchbearer of a flame ignited by them. Today, I take pride in walking along the path they have laid. There could be no greater honor. When an award is passed from teacher to student, it is no longer the recognition of an individual’s efforts but the validation of a concept and a legacy.

Awards like this have special significance. They are not what you receive for an uphill task of climbing to the pinnacle but instead, they are received for working on the ground and taking pride in the collective rise. This is an award that does not set you apart but unifies you with humankind. That for me is the epitome of Akhuwat, the brotherhood of mankind, my entire life’s work and passion.

I started my career in the civil service of Pakistan and later parted ways but in hindsight, it equipped me for the journey ahead. My work itself is neither new, nor innovative, and I learned from no other than the teacher of all Muslims, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). He (PBUH) laid the foundation for the eradication of poverty through the message of Mawakhat or solidarity, whereby one household gives part of its possessions to one that has nothing, one neighborhood takes care of the financial hardships of another, and one community accepts the responsibility to build one that has fallen.

This is a simple yet profound formula for the equitable distribution of wealth. With this comes hand in hand the concept of small loans free from interest and service charges, in the tradition of the Prophet (PBUH) and in fact all religions. The world is now beginning to realize the grave reality of rising interest rates that are bringing the world economy to its knees and sending individuals and nations into spiraling debt. Economists have long tried to resolve the issue of world poverty. But let me remind you of one such solution that was given 1400 years ago. We at Akhuwat, have only reiterated the same methodology of Mawakhat and interest and collateral-free microfinance and with it the intrinsic belief in the goodness of humankind.

I am privileged to declare that Akhuwat has received the greatest support from the people of Pakistan. Equally, the Government of Pakistan has committed to the eradication of poverty and equitable growth for all. Our beneficiaries are our supporters, our successors, and our friends. They are the most trustworthy, and dedicated individuals who despite the impediments they face, remind us to stay resilient in the face of adversity.

I would like to express my humble gratitude to Akhuwat’s Board of Directors for their unwavering support and commitment towards our collective vision of creating a poverty-free world. I thank my friends, each and every one of our donors for taking Akhuwat to a global level and helping us to establish the world’s largest interest-free microfinance program.

Skeptics always said such programs are not sustainable. Yes, these are not sustainable but by the grace of God and the spirit of sacrifice & giving, programs like Akhuwat stood where economic wisdom ends as these programs don’t believe in “my share” or “cut-throat” competition. They believe in sharing and altruism. The spirit of giving is pervasive.

I would not be standing before you if it was not for the employees and volunteers of Akhuwat working selflessly in 400 cities across Pakistan. I wish to thank all of you for your dedication, your commitment, and above all your faith when many would ridicule the concept of interest-free microfinance. You believed when others doubted. Turning a fool’s dream into a pragmatic reality. I thank the Akhuwat family which never breached our trust and made possible an unbelievable 100% rate of return that to date puzzles the economic pundits.

When you take on a family as large as Akhuwat, you cannot help but at times sacrifice the moments you could be spending with your own family. My wife, Farrukh, and my children Junaid, and Farazeen – it has been your continuous love that has given me the strength that I needed to carry forward this mission. It was your support and fortitude that have given me the inner peace to take on the turmoil outside. Thank you for sharing the weight on my shoulders by always standing by my side.

My heartfelt gratitude to the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. It is my pledge on behalf of Pakistan, that we will continue our struggle till we reach our goal of a peaceful and poverty-free world.

To conclude, I would like to remember the man in whose honor we all are gathered here, the incomparable Ramon Magsaysay who said that a country is like a pyramid, like a tower. It is made up of millions of stones and the foundation stone of this pyramid is the common man.

Ladies and gentlemen, today, with immense appreciation I accept this Award on behalf of every foundation stone, on behalf of the common man and woman whose commitment and faith in goodness, piety, and in a prosperous future remains unshaken. I am grateful to be a part of the Magsaysay community, creating new bonds of solidarity with friends from Asia.

I believe the solution for poverty will be achieved by working in solidarity with the poor. Poverty is pain. Poverty is poison. We all remain poor until every single person in this world is poor. Let’s rise. Together, we will instill hope and become a voice for the voiceless.

Pakistan, says the UNESCO, has the world’s second highest number of children who are out of school, around five and a half million, some 66 percent of them girls. It can also be a dangerous place for education, being one of those countries seriously challenged by religious extremism. The shooting of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in 2012 and the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria just this year has appalled the world. But shocking as these events are, the problem is even broader than the cases may suggest, since the denial of education is caused as well by widespread poverty and the stark deficit in government spending on education.

In 1995, a group of six Pakistani business leaders and executives decided they could not just sit back and watch the country’s educational system deteriorate and thus leave the country’s poor trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. They needed to mobilize investments in education, and deciding at the outset that they could not ask for private sector support unless they put in their own money first, they built five schools contributing their own personal funds. They launched THE CITIZENS FOUNDATION (TCF) as a nonprofit organization, declaring as its mission “to remove barriers of class and privilege” through affordable, quality education and “to make the citizens of Pakistan agents of positive change.”

From the outset, TCF had a clear vision of the schools it would build: well-designed and fully-equipped buildings with a capacity for 180 students at the elementary level and 360 at the secondary level; located in poor districts, whether urban or rural; open to all, but maintaining a 50/50 balance of boys and girls; professionally managed by well-trained teachers.

To assure quality, TCF has adopted an improved version of the government-mandated curriculum; develops its own books and instructional materials; and runs intensive pre-service and in-service programs for its teachers in its two teacher training centers. To assure access by the poor, tuition fees are low and costs are heavily subsidized, with 100 percent of TCF students covered by full or partial scholarships. Books and uniforms for the children are provided free.

TCF’s success has been spectacular. From its initial five schools and eight hundred students in 1996, the TCF network has now grown to one thousand schools, spread over a hundred towns and cities, with over 145,000 students in attendance, and guided by 7,700 teachers and principals. Consistent with TCF’s expressed desire to open up employment opportunities for women, all the teachers in their schools are women. Academically, TCF students have a 92 percent passing rate, higher than the national average of 56 percent, in the Matric Test required to earn their Secondary School Certificates.

All this has become possible through a well-conceived portfolio of donor packages that taps corporate sponsors, and tens of thousands of individual donors, particularly among the Pakistani diaspora, through TCF chapters in seven countries outside Pakistan. This fund mobilization has been greatly aided by TCF’s corporate-style management system, an impressive track record in the academic results of TCF students, and by its reputation for transparency, accountability, and efficiency. TCF has successfully tapped a vital wellspring of civic responsiveness among Pakistanis, and hopes that its example will be followed by other groups. As one of its founders says, “This project belongs to the people of Pakistan. It’s for them to sustain. We have to learn to stand up and solve our problems.”

In electing THE CITIZENS FOUNDATION to receive the 2014 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes the social vision and high-level professionalism of its founders and those who run its schools, in successfully pursuing their conviction that, with sustained civic responsiveness, quality education made available to all, irrespective of religion, gender, or economic status, is the key to Pakistan’s brighter future.

It is immensely humbling and an absolute honor to stand here before you and accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award on behalf of my organisation, The Citizens Foundation (TCF). Thank you. We are humbled to be included amongst reputed personalities and be the first organization in Pakistan to receive this award.

In Pakistan, dinner table conversations in which one bemoans the current state of the country and its future prospects are all too common. People’s concerns are, at least, partly valid; Pakistan has a politically volatile landscape, and paltry public expenditure, amongst other challenges. But truth be told, we see that there is much more good than bad in this world. In the face of our country’s problems, there are innumerable people and NGOs working towards a better Pakistan. Nineteen years ago, our journey, too, started with a similar conversation. Inspired by a belief that the root cause of Pakistan’s problems stem from the lack of education, we resolved to establish quality schools in lesser privileged parts of the country. What started off as a vision to build a thousand schools, over the past nineteen years, garnered a kind of support that we had never imagined; we are constantly humbled by the scores of people, both at home and abroad, supporting our dream.

As the largest private provider of education in Pakistan, we feel a certain sense of pride at how far we’ve come, how far our students, staff, teachers, supporters, and donors, have brought TCF. Today, thousands of children are off the streets and in TCF’s primary and secondary schools. But despite recently reaching our milestone of one thousand schools, the journey ahead remains long, while some of our students have been admitted into Pakistan’s best higher education business and management institutes, many more children, in lesser privileged parts of the country, remain to be educated. We dream to see a day where no child, in Pakistan or elsewhere, should be deprived of a quality education, where regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds; children everywhere have equal opportunities to develop, academically and otherwise. We owe all our success so far to God, who blessed us with a wonderful family of supporters who keep our organisation running, and our amazing students who prove to be a daily motivation for this work.

It is a great honor for us to join the list of illustrious, inspiring, and untiring individuals and organisations that have been conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and we are excited for the host of opportunities that this award will bring with it.

The armed standoff between India and Pakistan has endured for more than fifty years, bringing with it four outright wars and continuing upheaval. Its flashpoint is Kashmir, claimed by both sides, but its roots lie in the shocking communal violence of Partition in 1947. In the years since then, memories of this disturbing event have fueled religion-infused nationalism and militarism in both countries and kept millions of fearful people poised for war. Today, both sides boast nuclear weapons and the stakes are global. The problem seems intractable. But IBN ABDUR REHMAN of Pakistan and LAXMINARAYAN RAMDAS of India believe there is hope. As leaders of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, they are building popular support for peace on both sides of the border. 

ABDUR REHMAN, a Punjabi Muslim born in 1930, was away at Aligarh University in 1947 when Partition violence erupted in his hometown and several members of his family were killed by rampaging communalists. LAXMINARAYAN RAMDAS, a Hindu from Mumbai, was fourteen at the time and living in Delhi. He remembers angry mobs threatening his parents for protecting a Muslim family. REHMAN was obliged to migrate to Pakistan with his father. In Lahore, he found his vocation in journalism, rising from post to post at leading Pakistani publications to become chief editor of the Pakistan Times in 1989. RAMDAS became a cadet at India’s Armed Forces Academy in Dehradun and, later, the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. He rose from command to command until, in 1990, he was named chief of India’s navy. 

By 1993, REHMAN had left The Times, under pressure for criticizing the government, and Ramdas had retired and acquired a Pakistani son-in-law. As tensions again rose between India and Pakistan, both men sought to influence their countries to change course. In September 1994, REHMAN joined twenty-four like-minded Indians and Pakistanis in Lahore to open a public dialogue for reconciliation and peace. This led to the formation of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy. REHMAN became founding chair of the Pakistan branch; RAMDAS was named vice-chair of the India branch and became chair in 1996. Both men guided the organization until 2003. 

The Forum’s chief weapon was dialogue. In a series of conventions beginning in 1995, it drew hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis together to promote demilitarization, denuclearization, and peace and to publish resolutions insisting upon mutual arms reductions and troop pullbacks; an end to cross-border provocations; and a “peaceful, democratic solution” in Kashmir. Meeting alternately in Pakistan and India, the conventions sustained this dialogue for ten years and more as the Forum’s base grew to embrace a web of environmental, human rights, trade union, and women’s rights activists as well as concerned citizens from the academe, industry, and the professions. 

During the same years, the Forum organized people-to-people delegations of lawmakers, diplomats, soldiers, artists, and students to open friendly talk channels between Indians and Pakistanis and to counteract propaganda in each country stigmatizing the other. And it campaigned for the liberalization of travel between the two countries and for the revision of hate-filled school textbooks. At another level, Forum leaders such as REHMAN and Ramdas worked behind the scenes with national leaders and opinion makers to promote the peace agenda. The Forum’s mission is not grandiose. “It is enough,” REHMAN says, “to contribute in easing the tension between the two countries by providing opportunities for people to meet.”

For REHMAN, the Forum’s peace initiative grew naturally from his work as one of Pakistan’s leading human rights advocates and as longtime director of the internationally esteemed Pakistan Human Rights Commission. In this role and also as a journalist, REHMAN has devoted decades to exposing systemic violations of the rights of women, children, workers, and minorities in Pakistan and to fighting corruption and the abuse of power. He has been a champion of democracy as a secular ideal in a country where, he says, “authoritarianism has been the rule and short-lived democratic facades an exception.” All this at considerable personal risk and sacrifice. As for India and Pakistan, he calls upon both countries to reject their “pathological obsession with the politics of hostility.” 

RAMDAS says, “I entered the armed services as a hawk and exited as a dove.” His military career made him intimately familiar with the limitations of military solutions to political problems. This led to his role in the Forum. Still, India’s explosion of a test atomic bomb in May 1998, RAMDAS says, “was one of the greatest turning points in my life.” In July, he signed a public declaration by retired military men declaring that “nuclear weapons should be banished from the South Asian region, and indeed from the entire globe.” With his wife, Lalita, he threw himself into the antinuclear cause, warning Indians and Pakistanis alike about their country’s unreliable “control and command systems” and about the naivete of nuclear deterrence.” Touring and speaking extensively, he exhorted everyone to guard against the seductiveness of solutions “through super-violence.”

RAMDAS and REHMAN both connect the problem of peace in the subcontinent to dangerous ideologies that associate religion with nationalism and patriotism, and to militarism and other antidemocratic forces. REHMAN rues his own country’s “absence of genuinely democratic institutions.” And RAMDAS has linked recent political trends in India to “the path to fascism.” Both have been smeared as traitors, but they are not moved. It is time to stop the belligerent shouting and listen to other voices, they say. When it comes to war and peace, REHMAN likes to say, “I believe the people are a little ahead of the governments.” 

In electing IBN ABDUR REHMAN and LAXMINARAYAN RAMDAS to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes their reaching across a hostile border to nurture a citizen-based consensus for peace between Pakistan and India.

Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation Distinguished Guests, Fellow Awardees and Dear Friends. 

I am extremely grateful to the trustees of Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting me as one of the two winners of the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. While I am overwhelmed by the honour done to me, I accept this award on behalf of thousands of supporters of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, who have struggled for a whole decade to find democratic and peaceful solutions for the problems that have bedeviled the people of not only India and Pakistan but the whole of the South Asian region. 

You are all familiar with the history of conflict and confrontation between two of South Asia’s largest states, the wars they have fought and the large scale diversion of their resources as preparation for bigger conflicts. The struggle for peace between these two neighbours has acquired much greater urgency since both of them acquired nuclear weapons and started a prohibitively expensive missile race. 

It has been our experience in South Asia that absence of armed conflict does not amount to peace. For five decades the governments of Pakistan and India have been frittering away their resources on preparations for war and the people have been paying a heavy price in the name of defence even during periods when there is no fighting along the borders. It has also been our experience that peace is not an ideal that can be pursued in isolation from other concerns of the people. That is why the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy has from the outset viewed peace as part of a comprehensive package that includes disarmament and denuclearization, democratic governance, promotion of a culture of tolerance and resistance to extremism in the name of belief and ideology, and democratic resolution of matters such as Kashmir. During the last couple of years forces of peace and justice across the globe have come under strain as a result of substitution of the ideal of peace with the gospel of security. South Asia too has faced attempts to devalue peace. 

While facing these challenges we are sustained by the support of a very large number of ordinary women and men in both countries who do not correspond to the images of Indian and Pakistani people the world media carries everyday. These people who constitute a majority in South Asia are neither blood-thirsty fundamentalists nor intolerant zealots out to convert the world. They live by their labour and are striving to realize their dreams of a better life for their children. I am happy that the honour done to my dear friend Admiral Ramdas in India and myself will enable the world to recognize these peaceful millions and also encourage them to pursue the goal of peace and their fulfillment. 

I thank you again for the honour.

To all the world, leprosy is a curse. Its power to deform the face and body terrified the ancients and also their heirs. For most of history, leprosy sufferers lived apart, cast away by their frightened brethren to dwell alone or in squalid colonies of untouchables. And so it was in Pakistan when Dr. RUTH PFAU arrived in 1960.

PFAU was born in Germany and in her youth survived the havoc of Nazism, war, and foreign occupation. Amid the ferment of postwar Europe, she became a doctor and found direction in Catholicism. She joined the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, a religious order dedicated to the relief of misery, and asked to be sent to Asia.

Destined for a mission station in India, PFAU stopped along the way in Pakistan. There, in a Karachi slum, fellow members of her order had set up a ramshackle leprosy dispensary named after their founder, Marie Adelaide. Seeing the squalor and suffering, PFAU blurted out, “It can’t go on any more like this,” and halted her journey on the spot.

PFAU quickly reorganized the rough-hewn dispensary into a properly run leprosy clinic, despite the ambient filth and disorder and legions of needy patients. By chance, her efforts drew the attention of the German Leprosy Relief Association, which, along with other German donors, began to provide regular funding.

In two years’ time, she transferred the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre (MALC) to a proper hospital building and established a full-service leprosy treatment and rehabilitation center, free to patients. Volunteer specialists helped her, but PFAU built her staff mainly by training former patients to diagnose and treat the disease and to keep records. Meanwhile, she took note of the home districts of her patients and identified Pakistan’s leprosy belt-the first step in creating a national program of eradication.

In 1968, PFAU invited the government of Pakistan to undertake a National Leprosy Control Programme in partnership with MALC. Soon, she and her team began setting up leprosy-control centers across the country. PFAU traveled to the most remote and rugged corners of Pakistan, making now-legendary treks by horseback and camelback and by foot. In her far-flung clinics, MALC-trained paramedics identified leprosy victims and drew them into treatment. Multidrug-Regimen chemotherapy, introduced in 1984, offered a timely and effective cure. But PFAU trained her staff always to treat the person, not just the disease. She fostered social rehabilitation and worked desperately to remove the public fear of leprosy, making a point of holding her patients’ hands and calmly entering their dwellings for all to see.

Today, Karachi’s eight-story Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre is the hub of one hundred seventy leprosy control centers, with some eight hundred staff members. Leprosy still occurs in Pakistan. But by 1996, PFAU’s efforts had so reduced its incidence that the World Health Organization declared the disease to have been controlled in Pakistan, one of the first countries in Asia to achieve this goal. These days, Pfau’s regional centers sometimes double as tuberculosis or eye health clinics. Meanwhile, seventy-two-year-old Pfau, retired now, is busy helping to feed and repatriate Afghan refugees adrift in Pakistan.

PFAU long ago claimed Pakistan as home. She would like to do more there. “If I could be reborn again,” she says, “I would certainly dedicate myself to women’s rights in Pakistan.” As MALC’s guiding spirit, she reminds people of her own life-shaping realization of many years ago: A leprosy victim, no matter how wretched, has “only one life to live out-one single life, a life just like mine.”

In electing RUTH PFAU to receive the 2002 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes her lifelong dedication to eradicate leprosy and its stigma in Pakistan, and other loving gifts to her adopted country.

Your Excellency President of the Philippines, Members of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen:

Dear Friends, thank you all for having taken the time out to join us here today. To begin, let me briefly introduce myself: I am a medical doctor, a German, a convert and a nun, by now 72; I have survived Nazi time, World War II, and so far, all the upheavals, riots, terrorist attacks in my adopted. I have slipped into a task which I never planned. I have been very happy in my life and I am still happy, and would do the same if I was to be asked to make my life’s decision once more.

I have an entire collection of signatures — many many signatures, and thumb impressions on sheets of paper and cards, of people who congratulated me to the award — patients, workers, friends from all over Pakistan, and beyond. The workers state proudly that it is “their” award I am receiving in their name. They are all very excited about it, so I was curious, what was special about it? Perhaps: that Asia asserts itself. Asserts itself constructively, proactively. The Asian Nobel Prize. I am happy to be able to assist Pakistan in this small way, to build the road to participate in the finding of our own identity.

What has actually made you think of us, the Leprosy Team? Looking back the past 40 years, there seems to have been a special grace with the programme. We did embark to do the impossible — to do the possible, we said in the beginning, what would this be for a challenge? The possible everybody could do. The hut made from wooden crates, in a slum in Karachi where leprosy work started, grew into a National Leprosy Programme, and achieved its goal, leprosy control, after 35 years of hard work across the country.

What makes me genuinely happy and grateful to God, is that this “leprosy control” does not only mean that we gained the victory over a bacillus — this is fairly easily done. Leprosy control meant for us, from the beginning, to be instrumental to change the lives of our patients, to help them to gain back their dignity, taken from them simply because they fell prey to an ordinary bacterial disease.

And while battling for their physical cure and their human dignity, this battle has changed us, too, has shaped our values, our “c.i.”, our corporate identity: the human person is in the centre of our concern. Our priority commitment is for tasks nobody is willing to tackle, and for disadvantaged groups who have no voice.

When we talk today about empowerment, it means to see the beauty and the value of the other. It is an act of love, love which is able to say, “You are precious, precious in God’s eyes and precious to me.” Able to say this in a world where we witness so much strife and hatred and rivalry and denial of the right of people to be different.

You had the courage to recognize with your prestigious award our fairly unknown group. A group upholding that we controlled leprosy. Thanks to modern multi-drug therapy and strategic planning but even more so thanks to loving concern for the patient.

For this I do thank you in the name of all our co-workers. The team is looking towards Manila to find their way of life recognized. Thank you for helping Asia to discover, rediscover, find, cling to, confess its values — values of the intellect and heart. Thanks for strengthening us on our way. Thank you.

The slums of modern Karachi, known as katchi abadis, began as the shanty towns of Muslim Indian refugees to Pakistan at the time of Partition. They swelled in the 1950s as rural folk sought jobs in Karachi’s burgeoning industries and swelled again when civil war overtook East Pakistan in 1971.

These spontaneous settlements of the uprooted poor grew with such speed that they wholly outstripped the government’s attempts to control them, flooding the city center and forming hundreds of illegal “colonies” on its periphery. In them, the striving poor lived in squalor, without titles, without services, without sewers and drains and water mains. They still do, in more than five hundred katchi abadis. In them live 40 percent of Karachi’s population: four million people!

Addressing this reality in 1972, the government of Pakistan declared that katchi abadis should be legally acknowledged (or “regularized”) and integrated into the city proper with infrastructure and services. But for many years thereafter little was accomplished. Urban councils failed at the task and so, too, did the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority, or SKAA, which the government established in 1987 to address the squatter problem in Sindh Province. But when TASNEEM AHMED SIDDIQUI became director general of SKAA in 1991, things changed.

As a trainee at Pakistan’s prestigious Civil Service Academy, SIDDIQUI met Akhter Hameed Khan. The young SIDDIQUI imbibed the formidable Khan’s moral passion to alleviate poverty and also his community-building approach to doing so. Later, as director general of the Hyderabad Development Authority, SIDDIQUI designed Khuda-ki-Basti, a housing project for the urban poor that imitated the way illegal squatters actually build their neighborhoods. Rejecting the stereotype of the poor as freeloaders and criminals, he saw the katchi abadis as centers of dynamism whose occupants were both industrious and resourceful. Projects like Khuda-ki-Basti succeed, he says, because they tap the “poor’s huge potential for finding solutions to their own problems.”

At SKAA, SIDDIQUI cut boldly through mounds of red tape to make it easier for katchi abadis to be regularized. He wrested control of the lease-assigning process from sluggish local councils and streamlined it, thereby giving slum residents swift security of tenure and making SKAA self-financing. He utilized practical low-cost technologies for SKAA infrastructure projects, weeding out corrupt contractors and reducing costs. He worked closely with the Orangi Pilot Project and NGOs to improve SKAA’s engagement with the communities and to enhance social services such as health care, family planning, credit, and education. Critically, SIDDIQUI and his staff established a working rapport with the katchi abadi dwellers themselves. They now install and pay for their own water and sewerage systems, maintain SKAA-built storm drains, coordinate the neighborhood leasing process, and collaborate with SKAA and NGOs to introduce the social services they most need. As active partners in upgrading their own neighborhoods, they are the key to the program’s sustainability.

Despite SIDDIQUI’s fast-track approach, the process is painstaking and slow. Many katchi abadis remain beyond the benevolent reach of SKAA’s small staff of 175. SIDDIQUI himself has been transferred in and out of the agency. Still, in hundreds of Karachi’s poorest neighborhoods, a quiet transformation has been set in motion.

For someone who likes to shake up the system, fifty-nine-year-old SIDDIQUI is a man of mild manners and considerate ways. He is famously accessible. He returns phone calls. Yet, as a reformer, he has been stung by smear campaigns and bureaucratic reprisals. About this and about the magnitude of the task his agency faces daily, he says, “I am a realist.” And adds, “And an optimist.”

In electing TASNEEM AHMED SIDDIQUI to receive the 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his demonstrating that a committed government agency working in partnership with NGOs and with the poor themselves can turn the tide against Pakistan’s crippling shelter crisis.

It is a great honour for me to accept this prestigious award. I feel particularly privileged because my election for this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, while recognizing that third world societies are in transition, supports the view that good government is possible if the method of governance were to be redefined and government decision-making made more participatory.

33 years ago when I joined the Civil Service of Pakistan, I was a young idealist. In my work I saw a great opportunity and potential to do good work for the country, particularly for the down-trodden and the under privileged.

Halfway through my career, the changing society in Pakistan changed more rapidly than the government could keep pace with. As a result, the writ of the government ran thin, and many of my colleagues fell victims to despair or opportunism. Apathy, indecisiveness and compromise became the hallmark of government service in Pakistan.

Against this discouraging background, I resolved to persist in my endeavor to understand the dynamics of change from the perspective of a civil servant. It was my observation that in spite of the government’s many weaknesses, there was sufficient space for organizing people and testing new concepts for achieving the prescribed objectives. What it needed was perseverance, a clear vision and commitment.

Once an outcast from the coveted Civil Service of Pakistan, my work gradually came to be recognized as a real option for reestablishing effective government. However, I must confess that I have not done anything great. I have only done what a good civil servant is expected to do.

Briefly, a few points need highlighting:

1. At a philosophical level, one can state the obvious: that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. At a practical level, as government functionaries, rather than losing heart, it is our responsibility to search for options for maintaining social stability and economic development.

2. Rather than trying to replace government functions with non-government organizations, the government should use NGOs for research and demonstration so that its own functioning may be upgraded. It is the responsibility and mandate of the government to provide basic services to its people, especially the low-income communities.

3. The only way we can achieve effective government is by reforming it, not through slogan-mongering but through professional and persistent efforts on the part of the enlightened government functionaries, committed professionals and concerned citizens. Governments have also to discard conventional approaches and evolve pro-people processes of planning and implementation, based on structured partnerships with all relevant groups.

I hope the recognition of my work can help the cause of good governance in Pakistan. I also hope my younger colleagues in government will recognize the need for change, and find inspiration and direction in the work we have been doing in different facets of public life.

I thank you once again for the honor you have done me. I would also like to thank the many people who have and are continuing to work with me. I particularly wish to thank my wife and my children who have stood steadfast through difficult times, without whose encouragement and support I could not have pursued my professional compulsions so single-mindedly.

In Sindh Province, Pakistan, poor people suffer disproportionately from kidney and urinary system diseases. Stones are a common scourge, and every year three thousand men, women, and children face end-stage renal (kidney) failure. For these people, early death is certain without dialysis or an organ transplant. Yet specialized treatments like these are rare and generally exorbitant in Pakistan; the cost of dialysis alone is four times the average annual per capita income. As a government doctor, SYED ADIBUL HASAN RIZVI believes it is wrong for such life-saving measures to be so hopelessly out of reach. At his state-of-the-art institute in Karachi, he provides them free of charge.

Indian-born RIZVI studied medicine at Dow Medical College in Karachi and for nine years honed his surgical skills in Great Britain, specializing in urology. Spurning the temptation to remain abroad, in 1971 he returned home to establish his specialty at Civil Hospital in Karachi. This public hospital possessed no instruments for treating renal patients at the time, not even an operating table. Allotted an eight-bed unit in the Burns Ward, RIZVI set to work.

Beginning with urology surgery, RIZVI expanded his clinic’s services year by year, patiently adding dialysis treatment, ultrasound testing, and other high-tech facilities. In 1985, he performed Civil Hospital’s first kidney transplant operations. Constantly outstripping the meager funds available, RIZVI motivated private donors to supplement government allocations. His clinic blossomed into a separate department, and in 1992, became an autonomous institute within Civil Hospital: the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, or SIUT.

RIZVI’s institute today is an oasis of cleanliness, efficiency, and excellence. With the latest equipment and a dedicated staff of more than four hundred doctors, nurses, and technicians, it provides services once unheard of in a public hospital in Pakistan to over one hundred thousand patients a year, for everything from kidney stones to end-stage renal failure. In 1997, the institute administered thirty-five thousand dialysis sessions; ninety-seven individuals received new kidneys. The cost of all this runs to more than four million dollars a year. But RIZVI believes that everyone, rich or poor, has a right to good health care. At his institute patients pay nothing.

At SIUT today, Dr. RIZVI and his staff train young doctors in urology and engage in research shared with hospitals, medical schools, and research centers throughout the world. The institute is a model for others in Pakistan and beyond. And soon, on a site donated by the government of Sindh, a new five-story SIUT kidney center will house one of the most modern medical centers in South Asia. Seventy percent of the institute’s expenses are now met through donations. Contributors include Pakistani philanthropists and generous companies like the Dewan Group. But prominent among them are hundreds of grateful patients and many thousands of Pakistani Muslims who dedicate a part of their annual zakat alms to support SIUT.

Bespectacled and with a shock of white hair, 58-year-old RIZVI is “the conscience of Karachi,” says an admirer. In a city torn by ethnic strife, his institute is a haven of tolerance. When talking about SIUT’s work and needs, RIZVI draws attention not to himself but to his staff and beloved patients, the vast majority of whom represent the rural folk of Sindh. Reflecting on the kidney transplant that saved his life, one of them says, “One can’t imagine what a blessing this place is for a country like ours.”

In electing SYED ADIBUL HASAN RIZVI to receive the 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his transcending the limits of a public service hospital to make kidney dialysis, renal transplants, and other life-saving medical services available free to thousands of Pakistani citizens.

I am very happy to be here with you today to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I feel honored, humbled and deeply moved that you should give this prestigious award to an ordinary doctor from Pakistan.

I believe that this prize is a recognition of the power of teamwork, community effort and the true grit and determination of people. It is the recognition of the fact that in spite of crushing poverty, illiteracy and other problems chaining us down, the evolution of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation from an 8-bed ward to a state-of-the-art Institution is because man craves and demands his basic right to good health.

This evolution has not been easy. SlUT had its teething problems and running it has been, and still is, a tireless daily struggle. This is because we at the SIUT, while seeing our own expansion, remember that everything around us is expanding at the same time. You cannot afford to indulge even for the shortest period of time in testing your own oars. You must continually drive the vast machine forward at its utmost speed. To lose the momentum is not merely a personal loss but also a loss for my team.

Ladies and Gentlemen, today I have come to Manila as beneficiary of a trust. I say I come as a trustee for I am aware that this prize is much more than a personal honor. I am standing here mainly as a representative of my team doctors, nurses, paramedics. The community at large has supported us generously in coin and in kind. Journalists have always supported our cause and guided us. Last but not the least I represent the patients; both the fortunate ones and the unfortunate ones. Fortunate are those who are living; unfortunate were those who are dead and died simply because of want. I dedicate my cash prize to the SIUT fund in the memory of such patients.

This award has propelled me and my colleagues at the SIUT to consolidate and expand our work being mindful of future generations. Let it never be said by them that indifference, cynicism and selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideal of humanism which the Magsaysay Award encapsulates.

I accept the award with total gratitude to the Foundation and to the people of the Philippines.

“All citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law.” This and other fundamental rights are enshrined within the Constitution of Pakistan. Yet recent efforts to Islamize Pakistan have compromised the secular spirit of the constitution: laws protecting women have been weakened; blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad is now punishable by death. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, it is common in Pakistan today for women and girls to be assaulted, raped, and murdered without any practical recourse to justice; at the same time, minority sects and free thinkers in the country stand virtually unprotected against malicious attacks by religious zealots.

Under these vexing circumstances, ASMA JAHANGIR, a lawyer, strives to apply the laws of her country fairly; but where the laws of Pakistan do not conform to a humane and equitable standard, she also strives to change them.

JAHANGIR was only eighteen years old when she stepped into the limelight to challenge her father’s arrest by Pakistan’s martial law government. By the age of twenty-eight, she had married and opened a law practice in Lahore with her sister, Hina Jilani, and two other women. Most of her clients were women. For them, JAHANGIR and her partners often represented the only hope for justice in a society where traditional attitudes and practices weighed heavily against females. As her law practice grew, JAHANGIR threw herself into the broad struggle for reform in Pakistan. She clashed fearlessly with the military government of Zia-ul Haq and, in 1984, was arrested for sedition. In 1986, she became founding secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, dedicated to documenting the rampant mistreatment and exploitation of women, children, minorities, and laborers and to bringing Pakistan within the pale of international human rights standards.

Under new laws promulgated amid the Islamization of the 1980s, a woman in Pakistan who accuses a man of rape may easily fall victim to the countercharge of zina, the crime of adultery and sex-out-of-wedlock. Over 80 percent of the women in jail in Pakistan today have been arrested on exactly this charge. JAHANGIR’s law firm advises and defends such women and pleads forcefully against laws that jeopardize females; meanwhile, its free legal aid center provides reader-friendly pamphlets and a team of paralegal assistants to educate women about their current rights and legal options.

Pakistan’s blasphemy law is notoriously subject to abuse. Victims of spurious charges (in some cases, illiterate youths and targets of personal vendettas—Christian and Muslim alike) have been herded into court or, worse, beaten or murdered by fanatical self-anointed religious Purifiers. JAHANGIR calls the law “terrifying” and has defended several of its victims, winning important victories in the Supreme Court. She is mobilizing support for the law’s repeal and, in the meantime, for safeguards against its capricious abuse.

Asked to become Pakistan’s first woman judge in 1994, JAHANGIR declined, saying, “It would be hypocrisy to be a judge and defend laws that I don’t believe in.”

Working ten hours a day and more, with not enough time to savor her three children, ASMA JAHANGIR struggles on many fronts to stem the tide of theocratization and lawlessness in Pakistan. She is optimistic. As the outcome hangs in the balance, however, her bold stand for pluralism and fundamental human rights angers the country’s religious conservatives and zealots. Some merely stigmatize her as a “modern woman.” Others threaten to kill her.

In electing ASMA JAHANGIR to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes her challenging Pakistan to embrace and uphold the principles of religious tolerance, gender equality, and equal protection under the law.

It is a great honor for me to accept this prestigious Award. My colleagues of the human rights movement and I thank you for this support. My struggle is not a lonely one but a struggle shared by many women and men of integrity and purpose. We are committed to uphold those values of human rights that call for equality, justice, and equity for all peoples—a world without discrimination of any manner whatsoever, a world where people can live a life free of exploitation.

The Magsaysay Award has a special significance, as it comes from a country that is rich with a tradition of liberation movements and a society that has the most active and robust social action groups. This honor bestowed by you is like recognition by one’s own family, which has its own special value.

While I accept the Award, I feel embarrassed as well. Embarrassed when I compare what little we have achieved against what has still to be achieved. Our first small steps are only the beginning of a very long, arduous, and painful struggle to establish justice in our societies. By complimenting and coordinating our efforts as fellow Asians, we are sure to strengthen our cause. This Award has placed a grave responsibility on me to prove worthy of it. I assure you that your generosity will assist me in spawning similar awards for human rights and civil liberties in Pakistan.

On behalf of my husband and myself, I thank the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for their warm hospitality and an opportunity to visit this beautiful country.

To Gilgit, Chitral and Baltistan, merchants on the Silk Road to China once brought trade, news of the world, and Islam. But by the 1970s global shifts had rendered these high mountain regions Pakistan’s remotest districts. Lost behind the ranges, their hardy farmers and herdsmen survived by wresting sustenance from a stingy and progressively degraded habitat. They faced bleak prospects when, in 1978, the Karakorum Highway renewed their links to the outside world and exposed them to the forces of Pakistan’s modern economy “down country.” Stepping in to help them catch up, and to channel outside forces to the good, was. the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme and its able general manager SHOAIB SULTAN KHAN.

As a young civil service officer, KHAN learned from Akhter Hameed Khan that democratic village institutions can empower the rural poor to become masters of their own development. He adapted his mentor’s insights to mountain communities in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier and in Sri Lanka, where he lived in a forest village to help UNICEF devise an effective social development program for rural settlers. He was thus an experienced development administrator when, in December 1982, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme asked him to introduce income generating activities to nearly a million people in Pakistan’s vast and rugged northern areas.

KHAN believes that physical infrastructure projects provide the best catalysts for collective decision making and accountability in poor, rural communities. In his initial dialogues with villagers, therefore, he explained that the Programme would give each village a one-time-only grant for such a project — but on certain conditions. The villagers must choose the project collectively and it must benefit everyone; they must form an organization to plan, build, and maintain the project; they must meet regularly with everyone present; and they must make systematic contributions to a common fund so that there would be savings and collateral to help meet future needs.

As projects got underway, KHAN’s staff members carefully monitored the construction of each new irrigation channel and link road, and funnelled equipment, supplies, and essential expertise to the village builders. And as new land was opened to irrigation, KHAN urged villagers on to the next stage. “The sooner you develop the land,” he told them, “the sooner you will benefit.” To help, the Programme introduced new strains of plants, taught villagers new skills, and encouraged the region’s illiterate and ever-toiling women to assert themselves and participate in collective initiatives of their own.

To date, more than one thousand local projects funded by the Programme have brought 20,000 hectares of new land under cultivation. Seven thousand villagers have been trained as managers, accountants, and specialists in farming, animal husbandry, forestry and marketing. Local organizations in some 1,400 mountain villages now manage livelihood projects, generate capital, and conserve local resources. Millions of trees supplied by the Programme anchor the thin mountain soil and yield apricots and apples for selling “down country,” as well as fuel and timber for the future. The hills are alive with a new and confident spirit.

As his working method attracts the attention of other development workers world-wide, KHAN’s vision is spreading. Meanwhile, the amiable and gentle KHAN spends much of his time walking and talking with villagers. In this way he reminds his staff that at the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme the needs of villagers come first, and that the heart of any successful development effort lies not in the office but in the field.

In electing SHOAIB SULTAN KHAN to receive the 1992 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the Board of Trustees recognizes his nurturing self-reliant development and bringing hope to the forgotten peoples of high Pakistan. 

My mentor and teacher, Akhter Hameed Khan, received the Magsaysay Award nearly three decades ago. It was not in my wildest dreams that I would one day follow in his footsteps to this august ceremony. I learned the art of rural development at his feet in the late fifties and continue to benefit from his vision and deep insight until today. It is to Akhter Hameed Khan that I owe my understanding of the theory and practice of rural development.

In my career of nearly four decades, I have had three benefactors: the Government of Pakistan; the United Nations (particularly UNICEF); and His Highness, the Aga Khan. The last one, with whom I have now been associated for a decade, gave me a long-term perspective and inspired guidance, commitment, and dedication to the cause of eradicating poverty. The Aga Khan evinces a level of interest and gives the kind of support that I have never had before, to do the type of work I want to do for the rural poor. His Highness truly made my dream come true. The decision this month by Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif to extend the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) to the whole of Pakistan, through a National Rural Support Programme patterned after AKRSP, is a direct result of His Highness’s desire that AKRSP develop a replicable model of rural development, as it improves the standard of living of the people of the Northern Areas of Pakistan.

To my colleagues in the Aga Khan Foundation in Geneva, Pakistan, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I owe special thanks for helping AKRSP in every possible way, as I do to the Aga Khan Development Network and the donors of AKRSP in the governments of Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, the European Union, Germany, United States, Norway, and various foundations, namely OXFAM, Konrad Adenauer, and Ford. The Operations Evaluation Department of the World Bank, through its two interim evaluations of AKRSP, gave the program a great impetus and global acceptability.

The support I received from my well wishers in Pakistan and abroad and my erstwhile colleagues in the government of Pakistan, the administration of North West Frontier Province and the Northern Areas, and a score of other agencies contributed tremendously to the development of AKRSP.

However, the people who made AKRSP possible are the workers of the program, who have been performing their duties, over a sustained period of time, with a sense of dedication and sincerity rarely found in most organizations. Their acceptance of the primacy of the village organization and their willingness to listen to and respect the views of the rural poor are the greatest strengths of AKRSP. Above all, it is to the people of the Northern Areas and of the Chitral District of Pakistan that the full credit for the achievements of AKRSP must go. It is they who responded so positively to the terms of partnership offered by AKRSP and fulfilled their obligations of organization, human resource development, and capital formation, the three cardinal principles on which AKRSP is based. It is the workers of AKRSP and the people of the program area who truly deserve the honor the award has bestowed on me.

I am sorry that my wife is not present here to share with me this moment of glory because she has made and continues to make the greatest personal sacrifice to enable me to work in a remote and isolated region, comprising the program area. I wish my daughters Roohi, Afshan, and Shelley and her husband Tim, and my grandchildren Sarah and Amil, were also here. But the one person whom my wife and I miss most on such occasions is our daughter Falaknaz, who died nearly four years ago with her two children in a gas suffocation tragedy at Islamabad. She would have been the happiest to see her daddy receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, which I accept with the greatest humility and with profuse thanks to the trustees of the Magsaysay Foundation.

Life is often cruel to the disadvantaged in Asia’s swollen sluminfested cities where they are cut off from the neighborliness they traditionally knew in the rural villages. Governments and more fortunate individuals seem blind to their plight. Where discarded infants may expire by the roadside and adult corpses lie awaiting the vultures, there is scant cause for confidence in man’s progress. 

The 100 million people of Pakistan have paid the price of survival. Amidst the political trauma following World War II and the dismantling of Britain’s empire, partition in the name of religion uprooted millions, shuttling Hindus and Muslims across the Punjabi border. Wars with India and three million refugees from Russian-occupied Afghanistan have compounded internal ethnolinguistic discord. Although the Indus River Valley is one of civilization’s original and most fertile sites, the drifting poor have suffered from lawlessness, feudal tyranny and disease. 

Born a Muslim 58 years ago in Kathiawar, Gujarat, Western India, ABDUL SATTAR EDHI migrated with his moderately prosperous family to Pakistan in 1947. It was the paralysis that afflicted his mother two years later that alerted EDHI to the suffering of the sick-at a time when most medicine was unavailable. With colleagues, in 1950 he established a charitable dispensary, the Bantva Memon Dispensary. Frustrated by the conservatism of his associates he assumed full responsibility for it in 1953 and eventually established a philanthropic trust in his own name, receiving 800,000 rupees (US$160,000) in donations the first year. 

With these funds EDHI built an emergency outpatient clinic, manned by a senior medical student, and a dispensary exclusively for women and children that included a training center for nurses. There after as voluntary donations allowed, he developed services for the destitute sick, mentally handicapped and drug addicts; runaway girls from unhappy homes or miserable marriages were given work and education. These facilities have become the 12-acre Apna Ghar (Our Home) 10 miles north of Karachi in Sohrab Ghar, and the Edhi Nursing Home in the suburb of Mithadar. Together they house and care for some 1,200, of whom more than half are mental patients. They are staffed by 300 nurses and 35 doctors whose only compensation is for transportation. EDHI explains that he prefers women workers because “they are less corrupt by nature.”

The Nursing Home is managed by Mrs. BILQIS EDHI, whom ABDUL SATTAR met 20 years ago when she was working with him as a volunteer. BILQUIS oversees maternity care and adoption services for abandoned babies, a family planning clinic, an emergency center with 24-hour service by 80 ambulances, an outpatient department and a shelter for the homeless. Since a decent burial is a concern of Islam, infant and adult corpses, found by the roadside or floating in the sea, are bathed and enshrouded. Many of the 7,500 bodies have been handled by the EDHIS personally. 

Refusing offers of government assistance, even from President Zia ul-Haq, the Abdul Sattar Edhi Trust and two sister foundations rely entirely upon contributions from the public. Queues of donors provide the daily cash equivalent of US$2,000, plus gifts in kind such as chickens, sheep, goats and clothing. Van loads of food sent by the trust to victims of floods and other disasters are quickly replaced by anonymous donations. 

The EDHIS take no salary; they, their four children and her mother live modestly on the income from his earlier business investments. They pray five times a day in the Muslim tradition, and in their lives demonstrate that Islam has its roots in service to others. Their personal ministry is to the destitute. 

In electing ABDUL SATTAR EDHI and BILQIS EDDLO EDHI to receive the 1986 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes their giving substance in an Islamic society to the ancient humane commandment that thou art thy brother’s keeper.

We are grateful to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting us to receive this highly prestigious Award in recognition of our humble humanitarian services. 

The human being is the finest creature of the Almighty. Unfortunately, by certain deeds, he has fallen to the lowest state. However he deserves our sympathy and attention. Serving humankind in distress is worship of God. 

We bow our heads in humility to Allah for guiding us in rendering this service to people. We began as individuals, and by God’s grace our work now is an institution. Today’s Award, I believe, is not for us as persons. It is for the services we have rendered. We will consider it as a debt, always reminding us to pay it back by more devotion to humanity. You may be interested if I briefly describe the scope of activities, steadily expanded, by our trust. 

My wife, BILQIS, runs the Center for Shelterless, including abandoned and innocent newly born babies. Some 1,039 such children have been taken care of so far by the center. Childless parents can adopt these children. Through this center, unique parent-children relationships are established on a purely humanitarian basis. 

Old, sick, crippled and shelterless persons find abode in the Edhi Home in Karachi. It currently accommodates some 1,700 such individuals. Our objective is to spread a network of homes for the shelterless in other cities of Pakistan, e.g. Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. 

For poor and sick persons our institution provides free, emergency ambulance services. Eighty ambulances are in operation, covering all of Pakistan. At a distance of every 100 miles an Ambulance Center has been organized. At these centers a fully equipped medical team is stationed to provide temporary treatment. The Edhi Foundation has been set up to carry out the work in an orderly way and without interruption. We intend to open similar centers in other big cities in Asia: Bombay, India; Dacca, Bangladesh; Colombo, Sri Lanka. 

Three round-the-clock dispensaries and maternity homes function under the management of the Edhi Trust. Here first-aid services are provided for accident cases. Some 150,000 individuals receive these services monthly, without any obligation on their part. 

My wife looks after a free maternity home of 100 beds in the suburbs of Karachi. Over 300 delivery cases, on an average, are attended to every month. Mrs. EDHI also manages a nursing department for less educated and poor widows so that they can earn an honorable livelihood rather than extend their hands for help. These poor women are trained here for six months. During this period a stipend equivalent to US$25 is paid them per month. The women are specially trained to clean dead bodies before burial as per Islamic law. Hundreds of such women have been trained and are now earning their livelihood with respect and honor. 

Our scope of activities include picking up dead bodies wherever found and regardless of the cause of death. If no heir or relative of the deceased is found, burial is done by the trust. When it is a police case, prompt assistance of authorities is sought and burial is arranged. 

Genuinely jobless persons willing to work and earn their livelihood are provided temporary assistance equivalent to US$20 per month for food and other needs. Crippled and elderly patients are given wheelchairs, beds, crutches, bed-urine pans and urine chairs for use in their homes, at a reasonable charge when they can afford to pay, but free in genuinely destitute cases. 

It is gratifying to inform you that, with Allah’s blessings, construction of a house for shelterless girls on a plot of about six hectares is in full swing and is expected to be completed within the next two years. When finished, this house will accommodate hundreds of destitute girls. There they will be given training in driving, first-aid, maternity and child care, washing of dead bodies, and attending crippled and mentally retarded persons. 

We are obliged to the people of Pakistan who generously donate funds equivalent to over US$2 million annually, funds which provide the resources for carrying out our activities. I am happy to declare that the money from this Award will be used to establish another foundation in Pakistan. May Allah bless you and us and guide us to give our utmost to the best of all his creatures — human beings.

Life is often cruel to the disadvantaged in Asia’s swollen sluminfested cities where they are cut off from the neighborliness they traditionally knew in the rural villages. Governments and more fortunate individuals seem blind to their plight. Where discarded infants may expire by the roadside and adult corpses lie awaiting the vultures, there is scant cause for confidence in man’s progress. 

The 100 million people of Pakistan have paid the price of survival. Amidst the political trauma following World War II and the dismantling of Britain’s empire, partition in the name of religion uprooted millions, shuttling Hindus and Muslims across the Punjabi border. Wars with India and three million refugees from Russian-occupied Afghanistan have compounded internal ethnolinguistic discord. Although the Indus River Valley is one of civilization’s original and most fertile sites, the drifting poor have suffered from lawlessness, feudal tyranny and disease. 

Born a Muslim 58 years ago in Kathiawar, Gujarat, Western India, ABDUL SATTAR EDHI migrated with his moderately prosperous family to Pakistan in 1947. It was the paralysis that afflicted his mother two years later that alerted EDHI to the suffering of the sick-at a time when most medicine was unavailable. With colleagues, in 1950 he established a charitable dispensary, the Bantva Memon Dispensary. Frustrated by the conservatism of his associates he assumed full responsibility for it in 1953 and eventually established a philanthropic trust in his own name, receiving 800,000 rupees (US$160,000) in donations the first year. 

With these funds EDHI built an emergency outpatient clinic, manned by a senior medical student, and a dispensary exclusively for women and children that included a training center for nurses. There after as voluntary donations allowed, he developed services for the destitute sick, mentally handicapped and drug addicts; runaway girls from unhappy homes or miserable marriages were given work and education. These facilities have become the 12-acre Apna Ghar (Our Home) 10 miles north of Karachi in Sohrab Ghar, and the Edhi Nursing Home in the suburb of Mithadar. Together they house and care for some 1,200, of whom more than half are mental patients. They are staffed by 300 nurses and 35 doctors whose only compensation is for transportation. EDHI explains that he prefers women workers because “they are less corrupt by nature.”

The Nursing Home is managed by Mrs. BILQIS EDHI, whom ABDUL SATTAR met 20 years ago when she was working with him as a volunteer. BILQUIS oversees maternity care and adoption services for abandoned babies, a family planning clinic, an emergency center with 24-hour service by 80 ambulances, an outpatient department and a shelter for the homeless. Since a decent burial is a concern of Islam, infant and adult corpses, found by the roadside or floating in the sea, are bathed and enshrouded. Many of the 7,500 bodies have been handled by the EDHIS personally. 

Refusing offers of government assistance, even from President Zia ul-Haq, the Abdul Sattar Edhi Trust and two sister foundations rely entirely upon contributions from the public. Queues of donors provide the daily cash equivalent of US$2,000, plus gifts in kind such as chickens, sheep, goats and clothing. Van loads of food sent by the trust to victims of floods and other disasters are quickly replaced by anonymous donations. 

The EDHIS take no salary; they, their four children and her mother live modestly on the income from his earlier business investments. They pray five times a day in the Muslim tradition, and in their lives demonstrate that Islam has its roots in service to others. Their personal ministry is to the destitute. 

In electing ABDUL SATTAR EDHI and BILQIS EDDLO EDHI to receive the 1986 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes their giving substance in an Islamic society to the ancient humane commandment that thou art thy brother’s keeper.

We are grateful to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for selecting us to receive this highly prestigious Award in recognition of our humble humanitarian services. 

The human being is the finest creature of the Almighty. Unfortunately, by certain deeds, he has fallen to the lowest state. However he deserves our sympathy and attention. Serving humankind in distress is worship of God. 

We bow our heads in humility to Allah for guiding us in rendering this service to people. We began as individuals, and by God’s grace our work now is an institution. Today’s Award, I believe, is not for us as persons. It is for the services we have rendered. We will consider it as a debt, always reminding us to pay it back by more devotion to humanity. You may be interested if I briefly describe the scope of activities, steadily expanded, by our trust. 

My wife, BILQIS, runs the Center for Shelterless, including abandoned and innocent newly born babies. Some 1,039 such children have been taken care of so far by the center. Childless parents can adopt these children. Through this center, unique parent-children relationships are established on a purely humanitarian basis. 

Old, sick, crippled and shelterless persons find abode in the Edhi Home in Karachi. It currently accommodates some 1,700 such individuals. Our objective is to spread a network of homes for the shelterless in other cities of Pakistan, e.g. Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. 

For poor and sick persons our institution provides free, emergency ambulance services. Eighty ambulances are in operation, covering all of Pakistan. At a distance of every 100 miles an Ambulance Center has been organized. At these centers a fully equipped medical team is stationed to provide temporary treatment. The Edhi Foundation has been set up to carry out the work in an orderly way and without interruption. We intend to open similar centers in other big cities in Asia: Bombay, India; Dacca, Bangladesh; Colombo, Sri Lanka. 

Three round-the-clock dispensaries and maternity homes function under the management of the Edhi Trust. Here first-aid services are provided for accident cases. Some 150,000 individuals receive these services monthly, without any obligation on their part. 

My wife looks after a free maternity home of 100 beds in the suburbs of Karachi. Over 300 delivery cases, on an average, are attended to every month. Mrs. EDHI also manages a nursing department for less educated and poor widows so that they can earn an honorable livelihood rather than extend their hands for help. These poor women are trained here for six months. During this period a stipend equivalent to US$25 is paid them per month. The women are specially trained to clean dead bodies before burial as per Islamic law. Hundreds of such women have been trained and are now earning their livelihood with respect and honor. 

Our scope of activities include picking up dead bodies wherever found and regardless of the cause of death. If no heir or relative of the deceased is found, burial is done by the trust. When it is a police case, prompt assistance of authorities is sought and burial is arranged. 

Genuinely jobless persons willing to work and earn their livelihood are provided temporary assistance equivalent to US$20 per month for food and other needs. Crippled and elderly patients are given wheelchairs, beds, crutches, bed-urine pans and urine chairs for use in their homes, at a reasonable charge when they can afford to pay, but free in genuinely destitute cases. 

It is gratifying to inform you that, with Allah’s blessings, construction of a house for shelterless girls on a plot of about six hectares is in full swing and is expected to be completed within the next two years. When finished, this house will accommodate hundreds of destitute girls. There they will be given training in driving, first-aid, maternity and child care, washing of dead bodies, and attending crippled and mentally retarded persons. 

We are obliged to the people of Pakistan who generously donate funds equivalent to over US$2 million annually, funds which provide the resources for carrying out our activities. I am happy to declare that the money from this Award will be used to establish another foundation in Pakistan. May Allah bless you and us and guide us to give our utmost to the best of all his creatures — human beings.