It is a land of familiar ironies and contrasts. An archipelago of astounding natural wealth and one of the world’s fastest-rising economies, Indonesia is also a country where the environment is threatened and poverty is widespread. The government is aggressively expanding power generation capacity to feed the economy but 90 percent of installed capacity still depends on ‘dirty’ fossil fuels and, even then, over a hundred million Indonesians, or half the nation’s population, are without electricity.

It is both a daunting problem and an exciting possibility—turning Indonesia’s vast reserves of sustainable energy into power, and at the same time releasing the dormant economic power of its rural population. This is the challenge that drives the life of TRI MUMPUNI.

Born in Semarang, Central Java—her father an economist, her mother a social worker—MUMPUNI developed a social conscience early in life, and, after earning a degree in social economics, immersed herself in rural development work. A turning point came in 1980 when she married Iskandar Kuntoadji, an engineer who in 1979 helped form Yayasan Mandiri, the first Indonesian nongovernment organization to promote hydropower technology for community development. Though the group was short-lived, Kuntoadji built considerable knowledge in hydropower technology. With his technical expertise and MUMPUNI’s social development commitment and entrepreneurial abilities, in 1993 the young couple formed People-Centered Business and Economic Institute, with the Indonesian acronym IBEKA, short for Institut Bisnis dan Ekonomi Kerakyatan. As a nongovernment organization, IBEKA committed itself to developing micro hydropower systems for impoverished rural communities.

This proved to be a daunting undertaking. As IBEKA’s leader, MUMPUNI had to struggle with restrictive state regulations, complex financing requirements, and the draining demands of social mobilization work. To meet the twin challenges of a social enterprise—remaining viable as a business without compromising its social mission—she had to focus all her energies on working at the level of the poorest communities, as well as with the highest government authorities. Operating deeply in the country’s remote regions had its grave dangers: in Aceh in 2008, MUMPUNI and her husband were kidnapped by former rebels, brought into the jungle, and forced to raise money from family and friends to ransom their freedom.

Skill, creativity, and determination, however, have turned IBEKA into an outstanding Indonesian example of social entrepreneurship, and cast MUMPUNI as a much-admired and influential leader in the field of community-based renewable energy. From its base in Subang, West Java, IBEKA has built sixty micro hydropower plants, with capacities ranging from 5 kilowatts to 250 kilowatts, providing electricity to half a million people in rural Indonesia. Equally important, it has done this through a community-based development approach that goes beyond the technology to the socioeconomic empowerment of communities. Putting a premium on community participation and ownership, IBEKA organizes electric cooperatives, trains villagers in technical management and resource conservation, and provides support in fund-facilitation and income-generating activities.

MUMPUNI works at the national level in promoting the role of hydropower in development, and in designing and implementing new models of government-business-community joint ventures in micro hydropower facilities. Boldly enterprising, she has effectively lobbied for changes in state policy that now allow independent micro hydropower plants to sell electricity to the government’s national grid. Despite what IBEKA has already accomplished, MUMPUNI knows that the task ahead remains formidable: there are still some twenty thousand villages without any electricity. But this is not just about technology and numbers. She says, “Electricity is not our main goal, but the potential to build villages that are economically empowered. This is my highest task.”

In electing TRI MUMPUNI to receive the 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her determined and collaborative efforts to promote micro hydropower technology, catalyze needed policy changes, and ensure full community participation, in bringing electricity and the fruits of development to the rural areas of Indonesia.

I believe that poverty is not the problem of development; poverty is a symptom of the larger problem of local communities who are disconnected from the local resources surrounding them, that can contribute to their human well-being. We are now living in a world of great disconnectedness: this is apparent at so many different levels. Many people, especially the poor, carry a sense of inadequacy from being part of a system that sees them not for what they are, but as numbers and elements of some statistical ledger.

IBEKA was founded by my husband and I in the 1990s, to unify what was even then breaking apart and disconnected; IBEKA sought to change this by sharing the world the way it is meant to be shared. Community has to be reconnected to their local resources, and the technology used has to be brought closer to the community. Thus the idea of “Community-Based Electrical Power Supply” was born. I thank my dear husband Iskandar for pioneering the concept and serving as my inspiration. Also for the many sacrifices he has made over the years, in ensuring that our vision of personal happiness is continually augmented by our caring for others! He has always been by my side, showing that a deep spirit of love binds us in this magnificent enterprise of life.

I assert that, contrary to general belief, we live in a generous world of great abundance: alongside this belief is my conviction that eradicating poverty succeeds only if this natural abundance is shared, nurtured, and guarded. Furthermore, natural wealth is to be shared at the grassroots level; wealth cannot be created or sustained by “top-down” approaches. Through the construction of micro-hydro generation plants in isolated communities previously without electricity, IBEKA has shown that our approach can succeed. Now, we would like to broaden our approach by using other technologies that will allow for increased economic impact but still in a sustainable way.

IBEKA and our community partners are propagators of sound eco-management. We are also guardians. IBEKA seeks to ensure that every investment made will create tangible welfare at the community level: every rupiah we spend must be put to good use. That is why we create community institutions that assume responsibility for operation and maintenance of facilities, as well as ultimate ownership.

Economic productivity is the outcome of such community-driven designs. IBEKA offers different micro hydropower models: one is an isolated power-grid operated and maintained by the community for their community’s own electrification; the other model is where redundant energy can be sold back to the grid. Income generated from such sale is put to collective use for village development purposes, such as giving scholarships to poor families. The great beauty of both approaches is that the entire structure is consensus-based, not imposed from the outside!

I am deeply honored to be part of a lineage of Ramon Magsaysay award recipients that include people like Mother Theresa and Muhammad Yunus: champions of the frail and poor, They and other Magsaysay awardees have always intuitively understood that in order for us all to be happy, we need to bring together disparate pieces into a whole: they are holistic thinkers with a deep respect for the community, and for the individuals that make up these pockets of living cultures.

I would like to end with a warm thank-you to all my colleagues at IBEKA, without whose passion and commitment I would not be standing here today: so this award honors you, too, dear fellow travelers on this path of unification!

My deepest thank you to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for honoring us with this great prize: it is my heart-felt wish that all 1.8 billion people in the Asia-Pacific region will share equitably and fairly in our wonderful natural resources, and that all people everywhere have access to basic energy in the form of electricity at a fair and affordable price! My final wish is that we all become good stewards of our responsibilities, and inspire others to share all the good things of this world!

Despite India’s remarkable economic boom in recent years, poverty remains urgent and widespread in this vast country. Forty-two percent of India’s population, or roughly four hundred million people, still live below the global poverty line. At the frontlines in addressing this problem is a huge civil society movement of a million non-government organizations, or NGOs. Yet, many of these organizations are small or ineffective. It is in the context of these challenges that DEEP JOSHI evolved his development work. 

JOSHI was raised in a remote village in Uttarakhand in the Himalayas, where until today there are few motor roads. But this marginalization did not prevent him from earning a degree from the National Institute of Technology in Allahabad, a master’s degree in engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a management degree from MIT’s Sloan School. 

Returning to India, he worked as a Ford Foundation program officer and accumulated experience in development work. Encounters in the field inspired him, in particular a visit to the US-trained medical doctors Rajanikant and Mabelle Arole, who were working on rural health in remote West-Central India. Deeply impressed by how the Aroles combined their sophisticated training with strong empathy for the poor, JOSHI concluded that if only more people equipped with both knowledge and empathy decided to work in the villages, India’s rural society would be transformed. 

This idea led him in 1983 to form, together with some colleagues, Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN). A non-profit organization, PRADAN recruits university-educated youth from campuses across the country and grooms them to do grassroots work through a rigorous year-long apprenticeship which combines formal training and guided practice in the field. “Professionalizing” development work is PRADAN’s mission. JOSHI says: “Civil society needs to have both head and heart. If all you have is bleeding hearts, it wouldn’t work. If you only have heads, then you are going to dictate solutions which do not touch the human chord.”

Living and working directly with India’s poorest communities, PRADAN staff empower village groups with technical, project implementation, and networking skills that increase both their income-generating capabilities and their actual family income. Its staff, combining their professional expertise with local knowledge, also train villagers as para-veterinarians, accountants, and technicians who support their fellow-villagers in building and sustaining collective livelihood projects. 

In its twin programs of training development professionals and reducing rural poverty, PRADAN has produced impressive results. It has reached over 170,000 families in over three thousand villages of India’s poorest states. Over a thousand graduates have joined its apprenticeship program. More than three hundred professionals comprise its staff, most of them working in field-based teams across the country. 

PRADAN is not founder-centric. It is a decentralized, collegial body that has developed institutional space for second-generation leaders. JOSHI is himself an exemplar of its strength and character as a professional organization, retiring at the policy-prescribed age despite the wish of his colleagues for him to stay on. Still, he remains deeply committed to PRADAN, now working purely as an Advisor. Modest, deeply respected by colleagues for his integrity and intelligence, he has shaped the professional ethos of the organization. 

JOSHI began by asking himself: Why would engineers and management professionals, with degrees from universities like Harvard and MIT, choose to apply their brainpower to a small village irrigation project? For someone who did exactly that, the pressing question was, what is stopping them? JOSHI desires to show that for people with the finest education, there are few intellectual challenges more worthy than addressing rural poverty. He says: “Development work is considered intellectually inferior to high science, industry, or diplomacy. We want to prove it is both a challenging and a noble choice.”

In electing DEEP JOSHI to receive the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his vision and leadership in bringing professionalism to the NGO movement in India by effectively combining “head” and “heart” in the transformative work of rural development.

It is an honor to be chosen for the Ramon Magsaysay Award, named after a great humanist of our times. 

Among those from my country so honored are saints of our times like Vinoba Bhave, Mother Teresa and Baba Amte; reformers like JP Narayan; artistes like Satyajit Ray; activists like Laxmi Jain and Aruna Roy; social entrepreneurs like Vergese Kurien; scientists like M.S. Swaminathan; community workers like Ela Bhatt — It is humbling to be joining such a galaxy of fellow citizens whose selfless, path-finding work I have always admired, some of whom I have had the privilege to know personally and one of whom, Mabelle Arole, indeed inspired whatever I have made of my life. 

The award is recognition of the hard work and dedication of my colleagues in PRADAN; it celebrates the idea of PRADAN, that education must serve a social purpose, that it must first be used to trigger transformations in communities mired in poverty and hopelessness. I do hope it also reminds us of the vast challenges that lie ahead of us to create a world without want, misery and strife. On a personal note, nothing I have done would be possible without the support of my family, especially my wife Sheela. 

The word “professional” used in my citation derives from “profess”, denoting people who had discovered the Truth through years of study and reflection and used their knowledge to aid the salvation of ordinary people. Possession of unique knowledge and its use in public service thus define a professional. We hold them in high regard. They enjoy much authority and respect in society. Only fellow professionals can question or challenge them, not ordinary citizens. The world today almost totally depends on professionals. We let them run our economies, plan our cities, manage our forests and factories, dispense justice, run governments, educate our children, look after our health, plan our future and even fight our wars… Yet, as we look around, the balance sheet does not quite add up. Widespread poverty and misery, strife in many parts of the world, a planet inexorably heating towards peril… Professions and professionals have not quite acquitted themselves… Something has gone horribly wrong…

I am also trained as a professional. As a young man who grew up in a tiny village in the Himalayas I was culturally an alien to the world of professions. What an engineer or a manager normally does did not seem fulfilling. I could not think of an alternative until serendipity brought me to the work of two doctors, Mabelle and Raj Arole, in a poor, drought-prone part of rural Maharashtra in western India. Seeing Mabelle work with poor, illiterate village women was my turning point. The bond she had with those women clearly arose from her deep interest in them as human beings. Yes, she needed her medical knowledge to introduce new health practices and behavior, but it was her empathy that helped her discern what was needed and win the villagers’ trust to get her ideas accepted. 

I learnt from this encounter what professional schools never taught me, that knowledge alone does not make you a professional. Knowledge must have a social purpose and that comes from a concern for others, empathy with others. It comes from the heart, just as knowledge resides in the head. 

It is the mission of PRADAN to bring educated Indians to work with poor people, as much to use their valuable knowledge as to express their concern for others. Over the years we have demonstrated the power of this idea. I believe we have only re-invented the definition of professionalism that has always existed. I am grateful that the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation agrees with us. 

I gratefully accept the award on behalf of my colleagues, all women and men working with poor people, my family and all the people in villages who have so willingly accepted us, taught us. Thank you very much.

Nangi Village, where MAHABIR PUN was born, rests high in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal. Here and in surrounding Myagdi District live the PUN Magar, whose men for generations have soldiered across the globe as Gurkhas. Yet, their worldly careers have done little to change their sleepy homeland, so far from the traffic patterns that knit together the rest of the world. Indeed, Nangi is seven hours’ hard climb from the nearest road. No telephone lines have ever reached it. Despite this, these days the people of Nangi are definitely connected to the world outside. Wireless Internet technology has made this possible. MAHABIR PUN has made it happen. 

PUN passed his boyhood grazing cattle and sheep in mountain pastures and attending a village school that had no paper or pencils or books. Wanting more for his son, PUN’s father moved the family to Nepal?s lowlands, where, in Chitwan, PUN finished high school and became a teacher, working for twelve years to help his younger siblings through school. Finally, a timely scholarship led him to a bachelor?s degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Then, in 1992, after more than twenty years away, PUN returned home to Nangi, determined to make things easier for other youths than they had been for him. 

Nangi’s leaders were busy establishing a village high school. PUN eagerly joined in. Once a month, he made the two-day trip to the nearest major town of Pokhara to check his email and maintain his links to friends abroad. This led, in 1997, to the donation of four used computers from Australia. Powering them with hydro-generators in a nearby stream, PUN began teaching computer classes at the Nangi High School. More computers followed, but it proved impossible to get a telephone connection to Pokhara and the Internet. 

PUN emailed the British Broadcasting Corporation, asking for ideas. In 2001, the BBC publicized his dilemma and within a year volunteers from Europe and the United States were helping him rig a wireless connection between Nangi and the neighboring village of Ramche, using TV dish antennas mounted in trees. Some small grants soon led to the construction of improvised mountaintop relay stations and a link to Pokhara. By 2003, Nangi was online. 

As word of PUN’s project bounced around the World Wide Web, backpacking volunteers carried more and more donated computers, parts, and equipment into the hills. PUN expanded the wireless network to embrace twelve villages-distributing ninety used computers to local schools and communication centers, connecting them to the Internet, teaching teachers how to use them, and then troubleshooting until everything worked. 

Today, connectivity is changing Myagdi. Using PUN’s “tele-teaching” network, good teachers in one school now instruct students in others. Local health workers use Wi-Fi to consult specialists in Pokhara. Once-isolated students surf the Net and are learning globe-savvy skills. Villagers e-market local products such as buffaloes, honey, teas, and jams and use the Web to draw paying trekkers to campsites outfitted with solar-powered hot showers. In parallel projects, the people of Nangi have added a library, health clinic, and new high-school classrooms. Meanwhile in Kathmandu, PUN has successfully lobbied parliament to legitimize and democratize wireless technology in Nepal. 

PUN, now fifty-two, is both self-effacing and charismatic. “I’m not in charge of anything,” he says. Yet, he seems to be the driving force of much around him. Eventually, he says, the people of Myagdi District will have to carry on for themselves. In the meantime, he hopes to play his unique role indefinitely. “As long as I can walk,” PUN says happily, “I can do this.” 

In electing MAHABIR PUN to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his innovative application of wireless computer technology in Nepal, bringing progress to remote mountain areas by connecting his village to the global village.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow awardees, and brothers and sisters. 

All of us grow up with lots of wishes. And we know for a fact that many of the wishes that we make can’t be fulfilled. As a young boy my wishes were to have enough food to eat, and warm clothes and shoes to wear. I wished to have books to read, pens and papers to write on. As I grew older, I wished to go to college and to become an engineer so that I could get a better job and have a good life. However, many of my were wishes not fulfilled. 

Memories of my old days’ unfulfilled wishes have become my vision of creating better educational opportunities for rural children and creating job opportunities for disadvantage people so that they can have meaningful, peaceful and better lives. The wireless network that we created in some of the mountain villages for educational, medical, and local e-commerce purposes was just a small part of my vision to create better learning opportunities for the children, to provide medical assistance to villagers during emergency situations, and to bring communication tools for the villagers. We still have a long way to go to make the wireless technology truly useful for the people, and to replicate the wireless network all over the country. 

I am not the only person to have this vision. This was the vision of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, who worked hard to improve the lives of fellow Filipinos and helped them live freely, happily and with justice. This is a common vision of all young people, parents, and community leaders around the world, who are working hard to help others live happily with justice and in liberty. 

However, I never wished to get any kind of award. For the last fifteen years, I was working only to fulfill my vision within my capacity. Therefore this award was the greatest surprise of my life, and I am very thankful for it. This award has boosted my spirit very much and I feel much younger now even if I have crossed half a century of my life. 

Let me share with you my lifelong vision, for I believe that visions will only be wishes if we don’t share it and work on it. The first vision I have is to set up vocational training schools for rural people so that the young can get better jobs in the national and international job market. The second is to help people start income generating programs in rural areas that are viable there to create the local economy and to create jobs locally. My third vision is to establish a college by 2015 and a university later on for the children of poor people, who can’t afford to go to college or university. My fourth vision is to bring information and communication technology to the remote villages of my country and use it for educational, medical, commercial and communication purposes. I am working on this vision with like-minded fellows in Nepal. 

This international recognition will be helpful for us to reach the visions that I mentioned. In this way, we will be able to help a little to make the vision of late President Ramon Magsaysay come true. We will make it happen not by word but by deed. 

Thank you.

Even in the best of times, it is arid in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, India. Yet not so long ago, streams and rivers in Alwar’s forest-covered foothills watered its villages and farms dependably and created there a generous if fragile human habitat. People lived prudently within this habitat, capturing precious monsoon rainwater in small earthen reservoirs called johads and revering the forest, from which they took sparingly. 

The twentieth century opened Alwar to miners and loggers who decimated its forests and damaged its watershed. Its streams and rivers dried up, then its farms. Dangerous floods now accompanied the monsoon rains. Overwhelmed by these calamities, villagers abandoned their johads. As men shifted to the cities for work, women spirited frail crops from dry ground and walked several kilometers a day to find water. Thus was Alwar when RAJENDRA SINGH first arrived in 1985. 

That was the year twenty-eight-year-old SINGH left his job in Jaipur and committed himself to rural development. With four companions from the small organization he led, Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS, Young India Association), he boarded a bus and traveled to a desolate village at the end of the line. Upon advice of a local sage, he began organizing villagers to repair and deepen old johads. 

When the refurbished ponds filled high with water after the monsoon rains, villagers were joyous and SINGH realized that the derelict johads offered a key to restoring Alwar’s degraded habitat. Once repaired, they not only stored precious rainwater but also replenished moisture in the soil and recharged village wells and streams. Moreover, villagers could make johads themselves using local skills and traditional technology. 

As TBS went to work, SINGH recruited a small staff of social workers and hundreds of volunteers. Expanding village by village — to 750 villages today — he and his team helped people identify their water-harvesting needs and assisted them with projects, but only when the entire village committed itself and pledged to meet half the costs. Aside from johads, TBS helped villagers repair wells and other old structures and mobilized them to plant trees on the hillsides to prevent erosion and restore the watershed. SINGH coordinated all these activities to mesh with the villagers’ traditional cycle of rituals. Meanwhile, with others, TBS waged a long and ultimately successful campaign to persuade India?s Supreme Court to close hundreds of mines and quarries that were despoiling Sariska National Park. 

Guided by Gandhi’s teachings of local autonomy and self-reliance, SINGH has introduced community-led institutions to each village. The Gram Sabha manages water conservation structures and sets the rules for livestock grazing and forest use. The Mahila Mandal organizes the local women’s savings and credit society. And the River Parliament, representing ninety villages, determines the allocation and price of water along the Arvari River. 

Now, 4,500 working johads dot Alwar and ten adjacent districts. Fed by a protected watershed and the revitalizing impact of the village reservoirs, five once-dormant rivers now flow year round. Land under cultivation has grown by five times and farm incomes are rising. For work, men no longer need to leave home. And for water, these days women need walk no farther than the village well. 

RAJENDRA SINGH is TBS’s charismatic motivator. Villagers call him Bai Sahab, Elder Brother, and listen to his every word. People have become greedy, he tells them. They should learn again to be grateful to nature. That is why, he says, in Alwar, “the first thing we do in the morning is touch the earth with reverence.”

In electing RAJENDRA SINGH to receive the 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his leading Rajasthani villagers in the steps of their ancestors to rehabilitate their degraded habitat and bring its dormant rivers back to life.

Your Excellency President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, brothers and sisters, distinguished guests. 

It is with great humility that I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. This Award really belongs to those communities in Rajasthan in northern India, who have worked against tremendous odds to bring life back to their lands. They share this achievement with the men and women of the Tarun Bharat Sangh who have shown courage and determination. 

Some 16 years ago when I arrived in Bheekampura village in Alwar District, we found that lack of water was driving young people away from theirhomes. Forced to abandon their families and the village, people had lost hope of seeing better days. The government had declared Alwar a ?dark? zone, meaning an area suffering from severe water shortage. 

However, the elders in the villages still had among them the wisdom of their ancestors. Working side by side with TBS, they built traditional earthen dams known as johads. These small-scale, low-cost structures do not look like very much but taken together in hundreds and thousands, they have changed the face of this part of India. With water has come productivity, more income, a sense of community and a real feeling of self-reliance. 

In 1996, we were amazed to find Arvari River flowing even at the peak of summer. We had been building water harvesting structures in the catchment area of Arvari over the years without realizing that we were in fact recharging the river through underground percolation. Since then 4 more rivers have become perennial. 

With the arrival of water, problems of sharing arose. As a result Arvari Sansad (or River Parliament) came into existence representing 72 villages. This Parliament meets four times a year. 

On another front, TBS had to wage a difficult battle against powerful marble mine owners who were destroying the ecology of the Sariska Tiger Sanctuary. Being located in the periphery of this Sanctuary, we filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India. While the case was on, I and my colleagues had to face continuous harassment and character assassination. The Supreme Court in its judgment vindicated our stand and over 450 marble mines were closed down in 1992. 

I may mention that Mahatma Gandhi has a special place in my perception and ideas. He wanted every village to be self-reliant. Our efforts culminating in this Award are a small tribute to Mahatma’s vision and thinking. 

Since being named a Ramon Magsaysay laureate, I have told my brothers and sisters back in India that this Award is a recognition of their untiring efforts. I have told them that the decision-making process leading to the building of johads can be replicated in other parts of India and in Asian countries where communities face similar challenges. 

This Award will inspire communities of Alwar and other parts of Rajasthan where we work. 

On their behalf, I am proud to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.

Rice is Asia’s staple food, the delicious grain upon which its civilizations have grown and flourished since earliest times. Over centuries, Asia’s farmers toiled to render forests into rice fields and tinkered endlessly to garner from each paddy and stalk just a little more rice. Rising populations in modern times have meant that more rice must be grown on less land, especially in China where people now number over a billion. YUAN LONGPIN, director general of the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center, has confronted this urgent need. His brilliant innovations in hybridization offer hope that, in the years to come, there will always be enough rice. 

As a boy during the Japanese War, YUAN followed his father across China to Chongqing, attending one school after another. An eager learner, he earned the nickname “Questioning student.” A visit to a horticultural garden awakened in him a love for plants. He studied agriculture in college and, as a young teacher at Anjiang School of Agriculture in Hunan, began his own experiments in crop breeding. Shocked by China’s great famine of 1958-1961 and by the impoverished life of rural villagers, YUAN devoted himself to developing higher-yielding rice plants. Thwarted by flawed Soviet theories and by the Cultural Revolution, he persisted despite disappointments and risks. Quietly shifting to sounder genetic models, he began to succeed. 

Hybridization held the key to unleashing the power of heterosis-the dramatic growth spurt that follows the crossing of genetically distant parent plants. Yet hybridization on a large scale seemed beyond the reach of plant scientists. By the early 1960s, many had abandoned the search. YUAN carried on, publishing a key scientific paper in 1966. The discovery of a naturally sterile male wild-rice variety in 1970 led to a breakthrough. With the robust support of the Chinese government, YUAN now led a nationwide team of researchers to develop in 1974 the “three-line hybridization system,” capable of producing high-yield hybrid seeds on a commercial scale. Able to yield 15-20 percent more rice per hectare than the best non-hybrid varieties of the time, YUAN’s new seeds spread rapidly in China. 

As a consequence, China’s rice production rose by 47.5 percent by the 1990s, even as some five million hectares of erstwhile paddy land was shifted to cash crops such as vegetables, fruits, cotton, and rapeseed. Meanwhile, at his research center in Changsha, YUAN raced to simplify and improve his technique, achieving a higher-yielding two-line system in 1996. Today, half of China’s rice land is planted to YUAN’s hybrids. At the same time, the business of hybrid seed production is raising incomes across the countryside. 

These days YUAN is perfecting what he calls super-hybrid rice, to yield 25-30 percent more than current hybrids. “If this materializes,” he says, “we can feed 100 million more people.”

YUAN’s research center has already trained 350 scientists from twenty-five countries. His hybrid rice technology is raising hopes for food self-sufficiency in Vietnam, India, the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and other Asian countries. All of this delights YUAN, who says, “One of my dreams is to make hybrid rice help more people in the world.” 

Lean and wiry at seventy years and still hard at work, Yuan is a man of simple ways who rides a motorcycle to the fields daily and dresses like a farmer. He has enriched the lives of millions of Chinese villagers, who revere him and call him the Father of Rice. YUAN returns the compliment. “The peasants in our country have a very rich experience in how to grow rice,” he says. “I have a lot to learn from them.” 

In electing YUAN LONGPIN to receive the 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes the unique contribution of his research in rice hybridization to food security in Asia.

Your Excellency President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, members of the Magsaysay Family, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen: 

It is my great honor and pleasure to attend this glorious ceremony to accept the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

First, I would like to express my hearty thanks to the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for recognizing the important role of hybrid rice in raising food yield and for setting a high value on my work in this research field. 

The success in the development of hybrid rice is a major breakthrough in rice breeding, providing an effective approach to increase rice yield by a big margin. In recent years, about 16 million hectares of paddy field are cultivated with hybrid rice each year in China. The average yield of hybrid rice is 7 tons per hectare which outyields the conventional pure line varieties by more than 1.5 tons per hectare. 

Our experiences showed that expansion of hybrid rice area is a most efficient and economic way to increase grain yield. At present, there are some 150 million hectares of rice in the world and the average yield is only 3 tons per hectare. According to FAO’S data, the acreage under hybrid rice in 1990 was 10% of the world’s rice area, but it produced 20% of total rice production. From this we can roughly calculate that if conventional rice were completely replaced by hybrid rice, total rice production in the world would be doubled, and this could meet one billion more people’s food requirements. Therefore, speeding up the development of hybrid rice in the world will be helpful to solve the starvation problems facing mankind. 

There is no national boundary in science. Hybrid rice technology belongs not only to China but also to the whole world. For the welfare of people all over the world, I will continue to do my best to promote the development of hybrid rice in and outside China, especially in developing countries. Let hybrid rice make greater contributions to the whole world. 

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.

On any given Sunday morning in the small city of Chiayi in south-central Taiwan, a merry band of citizens can be seen boarding trucks and riding off to the countryside. In private cars and on motorcycles, others join the convoy until, from near and far, they all assemble at a single site beside a river. Donning bamboo sun hats and baseball caps, the pilgrims take up shovels and hoes, baskets and pails, to build a bridge. Leading the party will be seventy-three-year-old HO MING-TEH, a bald and jolly Pied Piper who has built more than two hundred bridges in Taiwan’s Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties during the past twenty-five years.

HO MING-TEH, a devout Buddhist and former grocer, had already embarked upon a few modest projects, mending local roads and suspension bridges, when in 1971 a flood swept away an old wooden bridge in nearby Chungpu Township and took the lives of two brothers. As HO well knew, the countryside was full of decrepit wooden bridges. Moreover, no bridges at all spanned many of the region’s rivers and streams; to reach towns and markets, rural folk had to ford them. Bridges were needed – proper concrete bridges. HO resolved to build them.

Straightaway, he launched a fundraising campaign and, in just a few months, his first bridge was completed. Since then, HO’s bridges have been rising at the rate of nine a year.

Although trained as a youth in civil engineering, HO was not a professional bridge builder. He arranged for professional engineers and contractors to do the technical work. But he himself could assess the need for a bridge, draw up a plan, purchase the materials, and coordinate with local officials. He could also raise the money. To emphasize the spirit of giving, HO limited individual contributions to just a few dollars per project; yet private donations have yielded all the money needed for HO’s many bridges: more than U.S.$12 million over the years. In addition, HO invited everyone to join him each Sunday in the good deed of bridge-building, performing the many simple chores that require no technical skill. More than two hundred thousand volunteers have done so.

HO organized his projects casually, at first with no formal organization at all. But as one new bridge after another rose at his initiative, local newspapers anointed HO and his partners the Chiayi Philanthropy Group. He adopted the name formally on the day he inaugurated his one-hundredth bridge. Up till now, however, HO’s organization?which also helps poor families meet burial expenses?has no membership list or formal charter. Whoever chooses to contribute, contributes; whoever wishes to work, works. HO himself keeps the books, and his scrupulous reports to donors have earned the Chiayi Philanthropy Group a reputation for unshakable integrity.

HO’s concrete bridges vary in length from just a few meters to over one hundred; with distinctive white railings, each one is a replica of the other. Simple and strong, they dot the countryside, moving farm products swiftly and efficiently to market, opening once remote areas to tourism, and rendering daily travel safer. They are an incalculable practical boon to the people of Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties.

But they are also something more. These bridges have motivated many thousands of Taiwanese to devote themselves weekly to the cheerful work of helping others. HO MING-TEH, the inspiring force, seeks no credit. Buddhism, he notes, enjoins its followers to do good. And so he does.

In electing HO MING-TEH to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his improving rural Taiwan with good deeds and sturdy bridges.

It gives me great pleasure this evening to be the recipient of the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. First of all, I would like to express my sincerest appreciation to the board of trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for bestowing upon me this special honor.

However, I must reiterate that I am just a member of the eighty-thousand-strong Chiayi Philanthropy Group in the Republic of China on Taiwan. In the past twenty-odd years, believing that “doing good is the greatest source of happiness” and that “to do good is to invoke Heaven’s blessings and accumulate virtues,” all the group members have worked together to construct a total of 215 bridges in Taiwan’s rural areas. In building these bridges, our hearts are overflowing with joy and we have never entertained any thought of being awarded for what we have done. It is our belief that bridges will not only facilitate transportation but also bring people closer together psychologically, thus conducing to a happy and harmonious society. Therefore, this award is not so much a personal commendation as a recognition of what the group as a whole has been doing. We are committed to building even more bridges to benefit even more people.

In closing, I wish to pay my high tribute to what the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation has achieved over the past decades by setting up awards in memory of the late President Ramon Magsaysay to advocate freedom, universal love, and justice. It is my earnest hope that the Foundation will encourage more people to do good and to march toward a bright future, thus contributing toward peace and stability worldwide.

For Tokyo and other Japanese metropolises, the post-World War II boom years were the best of times. Not so, however, for Japan’s remote provinces and rural areas. Here, incomes declined and populations dwindled as young people drifted away in search of better lives in the city. Oita Prefecture, on the northeast coast of Kyushu Island, was such a place. Once Japan’s gateway to the outside world and an early center for Western learning in Asia, by the 1970s Oita was merely a backwater. In a nation rising quickly to wealth, Oita idled in relative poverty.

Governor MORIHIKO HIRAMATSU has changed this.

Born in Oita City in 1924, HIRAMATSU rose through local schools and served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Later he studied law at Tokyo University and, upon graduating in 1949, joined the powerful national ministry now known as MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. There he helped to regulate and advise Japan’s emerging electronics industry and observed the world-changing impact of computer technology. In 1975, he returned to Oita as vice-governor. Four years later he was elected governor.

How to revitalize Oita? Solving this problem became HIRAMATSU’s passion. Certain regions, he knew, had made a name for themselves by producing signature products—tangerines, pottery, shiitake mushrooms. Why not encourage every community to devote itself to a single product in which it could truly excel? This concept became the basis of HIRAMATSU’s innovative development plan: One village, one product.

Exploiting the spirit of local rivalry rooted in Oita’s feudal past, HIRAMATSU incited competition among the prefecture’s diverse communities as each one sought to identify and perfect a product of its own: Kakosu limes, Himeshima prawns, Oyama plums, and Beppu bambooware and hot springs. Building self-reliance was an important goal of the program. There were no subsidies. Instead, HIRAMATSU provided technical assistance to improve the local goods and to develop “value-added” byproducts: sauces and jams from the prefecture’s cornucopia of fruits; chowders, dried sardines, and animal feed from its marine life. The prefecture also publicized and marketed Oita’s products. Governor HIRAMATSU himself became the prefecture’s preeminent salesman.

HIRAMATSU complemented the “one village, one product” movement by aggressively recruiting high-tech industries to Oita and by building an infrastructure commensurate with the prefecture’s growing economy. Today, Oita’s flowers and mushrooms can be flown directly to markets in Tokyo—”ninety minutes fresh.” And futuristic new towns called Greenpolis, Marinopolis, and Technopolis are being developed as centers for forest, marine, and high-tech industries as well as centers for research and education.

“Think globally, act locally” is a motto HIRAMATSU repeatedly invokes. Oita should not become an economic appendage of Tokyo, he asserts, but a free-standing participant in the borderless economy of the globe. This is why Oita’s signature products are marketed aggressively abroad and why the governor has been vigorous in promoting foreign exchange programs and special events that link its citizens to dozens of countries around the world. Moreover, for several years now HIRAMATSU has been preaching the benefits of the “one village, one product” system to local governments near and far. From Louisiana (“One parish, one product”) to Fujian (“One village, one treasure”), HIRAMATSU’s idea is catching on.

Meanwhile, life in Oita is getting better. Unemployment is down. Incomes are up. And for Oita’s young people, a good future now beckons at home. Little wonder that ever-smiling HIRAMATSU has been elected governor five times running.

In electing MORIHIKO HIRAMATSU to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his awakening Oita prefecture to self-reliant economic growth through the “one village, one product” movement and a spirited call for local products with global appeal.

It is a great honor and privilege for me to receive this world-famous award, which is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Asia.” I must say, however, that I cannot accept this award alone. I humbly accept this award on behalf of all the people of my prefecture who are persistently working toward regional revitalization.

Furthermore, this award will not only encourage the people of Japan involved in the “One Village, One Product” Movement but, I believe, it will inspire the people of various regions of Asia who have adopted this movement as well. The ultimate goal of the “One Village, One Product”’ Movement is to foster human resources. I sincerely hope that the movement will further create people who can think globally and act locally.

Last year, the first Asia-Kyushu Regional Summit was held in Oita. And the next summit will be here in Manila in October of this year. It is my earnest hope that this award, together with the summit, will further facilitate the peaceful interchange between various regions of Asia.

I would like to thank you once again for the great honor that you have bestowed upon me and, with my heartfelt gratitude, I accept this award.

Coming of age at a time of great trial in China, FEI XIAOTONG abandoned his medical studies and turned to sociology. It was not enough to cure individuals, he concluded. The ills of China were rooted in its entire social and economic system. To cure them, one must understand the body of China. To FEI, the emerging social sciences of anthropology and sociology provided the key; yet these insightful new disciplines were largely rooted in Western studies of colonized “natives.” FEI vowed to create a sociology that spoke to the practical needs of the Chinese people.

To complete his doctoral studies at the University of London, FEI in 1936 conducted fieldwork in Kaihsienkung, a village on the Yangtze delta. Here he documented the travails of rice and silk-producing peasants beset by economic forces that they were helpless to escape or control. When the price of silk dropped on world markets, incomes dwindled in Kaihsienkung; marriages were delayed and, worse, farmers fell into debt and forfeited their lands to creditors. In Kaihsienkung, FEI glimpsed into the body of China; in it he observed that the condition of the peasants was “getting worse and worse.”

By 1938, Japanese invaders had overrun Kaihsienkung and much of eastern China. FEI retreated with fellow researchers to remote Yunnan and “experienced the hard bare facts of human existence.” Here, too, the land was becoming concentrated in the hands of a few town-dwelling landlords. FEI’s wartime research led him to call for “an effective land policy” to arrest this pernicious trend, but he also warned that land reform alone would not improve peasant life. What was needed was rural industrialization, organized to distribute the profits “as widely as possible.”

After 1945, FEI wrote prolifically about his country’s revolutionary crisis, analyzing China’s gentry-dominated class structure and the predatory economic relationship of the city to the countryside. Although not a communist himself, he greeted the 1949 victory of China’s communist revolution hopefully. As a social scientist and one who believed in seeking “truth through facts,” he sought a useful role for himself in the new China.

FEI was soon tapped to join a huge ethnographic research project to document China’s ethnic minorities. But China’s new leaders were suspicious of the social sciences. In 1952, they declared sociology illegitimate and banned it from the schools. In 1957, when FEI complained that government policies in Kaihsienkung neglected rural industries, he was declared a rightist and forbidden to teach. The ensuing Cultural Revolution brought humiliation and obscurity.

Twenty years passed. The storm clouds parted and both FEI and sociology were rehabilitated. In 1978, the Chinese government adopted a development program that followed FEI’s precept of “leave the farm but not the village.” It favored small-town-based industrialization as a road to improved peasant incomes and as an antidote to glutted mega-cities. Today, FEl’s insight is changing the face of China. Proliferating township and village enterprises are enabling millions of Chinese to improve and diversify their livelihood and providing a rural foundation for China’s unprecedented economic growth.

Now a commanding figure in the scholarly world at home and abroad, eighty-three-year-old FEI is cheered by the nascent prosperity of China’s countryside. Emerging amidst the quickening economic life is a wiser, more broad-minded populace. This bodes well for China. So also does “the vigorous blooming of hundreds of flowers in the garden of Chinese sociology.”

In electing FEI XIAOTONG to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his giving Chinese substance to the modern social sciences and applying them rigorously to the needs of China and its people.

I feel deeply grateful to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my sincere respect for the late president of the Philippines. We cherish the purpose of this award in building a society in which all people are free and live in honor and peace with one another.

We Asian people suffered a lot from humiliation and oppression in the twentieth century. What we feel proud of is that it is also in this century that we have all emancipated ourselves and become the masters of our own lands. People of my age will never forget this part of history, bitter first, then sweet. It should be a cohesive and driving force for the people of Asia to unite and march toward a more prosperous and beautiful twenty-first century.

We in Asia have ancient civilizations. Brave and industrious and great in number, we Asians ought to cherish a firm confidence in making greater contributions to world peace and prosperity in the years to come.

I have already stepped into my old age. Over the past eighty years and more, I was brought up and supported by my parents and fellow villagers, who made it possible for me to receive a modern education. Yet, I feel uneasy that I have not done enough for the Asian people, so I feel reluctant to accept this prestigious award today. However, I will not fail to live up to the encouragement and expectations of our friendly neighbors. However little time there may be in my disposition, I shall conscientiously make the best of it to do whatever is beneficial to the people of Asia and the world at large, especially by placing accumulated human knowledge in the service of our society.

A decent home, everywhere, is a hallmark of human dignity. Yet in the cities of Asia today, how many millions of people lack a decent home? How many find shelter beneath bridges and overpasses, beside the rails, or perched in trashwood shanties above the drainage canals? How many subsist without legal title in ubiquitous slums lacking even the simplest amenities? We do not know exactly. In some Asian cities, squatters and slum dwellers account for more than half the inhabitants. And the number is growing as newcomers arrive daily from the countryside, overtaking completely the efforts of government to either assist or contain them. To the better-off classes, these mushrooming cities of the poor are a blight and an impediment to new business parks, condominiums, and shopping malls. Eviction is the common solution. For nearly twenty years, EDUARDO JORGE ANZORENA has devoted himself to this wrenching human dilemma.

Argentinean by birth, ANZORENA entered the Society of Jesus as a young man and joined its mission in Japan. While completing his studies in theology there, he also earned a doctorate in architecture from Tokyo University, rendering his dissertation in Japanese. As he began his teaching career at Sophia University, ANZORENA also sought exposure to life beyond the confines of his privileged university and of prosperous Japan. With Mother Teresa in Calcutta and among relocated squatters in the Philippines, he confronted first-hand the common life of Asia’s urban poor and their desperate need for secure and decent shelter. He wondered what could be done?

For ideas, ANZORENA met in 1975 with groups working to improve housing in the slums of Latin America. He then embarked upon his own study of the housing crisis in Asia, locating community organizers in the region’s poorest neighborhoods and studying NGOs and people’s organizations that worked. Thus ANZORENA began his annual pilgrimage to the cities of Asia— to search for innovative answers to the perennial problems of slum life, to share his discoveries with other housing activists, and to steer needed financial assistance toward promising experiments.

In 1976 ANZORENA launched a bi-annual newsletter in which he published the fruits of his wanderings. Here housing advocates in, say, Dhaka, could read about approaches being tried in Bombay, Manila, or Mexico City, to organize communities and reduce the cost of housing, to bring new economic opportunities to the poor, and to arrange professional assistance and links to government programs. In 1988 members of ANZORENA’s network joined formally to create the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, which mounts coordinated responses to mass evictions and works to define and achieve housing rights for Asia’s poor.

Although the strategies shared by ANZORENA’s far-flung associates are varied, they possess common premises that reflect his own beliefs. Respect for the poor is the first of these. A second is that technical assistance and funding are not enough; to change communities in the long run, the people must organize to help themselves.

ANZORENA, it is said, “teaches in Japanese, prays in Spanish, and writes in English.” These days he devotes half of each year to his travels in Asia. His network continually grows. His role within it, he says, is to merely “support and encourage.” But others think of him as a catalyst and mentor: “He asks questions and makes us think. When he leaves, we always have something to do.”

In electing EDUARDO JORGE ANZORENA to receive the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his fostering a collaborative search for humane and practical solutions to the housing crisis among Asia’s urban poor.

I want to thank very much the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for bestowing upon me the honor of this award for international understanding.

Many former Magsaysay awardees have taught me how the poor can improve their own situation and habitat with their own energies: Dr. Akhter Hameed Khan, Dr. Mohammed Yunus, Fr. Richard Timm, Duang Prateep, and the Bogum Jahru team from Korea.

I want to thank my Philippine friends because they called me to this work and guided me from the beginning to now. They are the organizations Freedom to Build, Marian, COPE, CHHED, Pagtambayayong, UPA, FDUP, and the Human Development Office of the Jesuits; and so many other individuals and people’s organizations.

Thanks to the friends from the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights, representing all the countries of Asia.

I need to thank especially the urban poor with whom I have related and collaborated during these years. But to tell you the truth, when I was called to this podium to receive the prize, I had a very strong feeling that I was not the real recipient of this award. The only thing I did was to try to understand the heroic struggle of millions of human beings who, for survival, left the countryside and are enduring the inhuman conditions of urban slums. Of course, I will transfer the whole amount of the prize to them, but still that is not enough. I feel that they are telling me:

Jorge, it is okay. Go ahead. You can receive the prize for international understanding for us and for our children. We are unnecessarily sick and we are dying before our time because our water is not clean. We do not have toilets and medicines. We do not have permanent jobs. Yet we are also citizens. With respect to our habitat, please ask society to stop the people who aggravate our situation by throwing our women and children to the streets. Please do not evict us without giving us a decent alternative. More than a hundred thousand of our families are evicted every year in Asia.

Ask society to please support our efforts to improve our environment. Hundreds of thousands of us are involved in innovative approaches to do this. If there are problems, please collaborate in improving communication between us and those in power. And in your good efforts to improve our lot, please be consistent from one government administration to the next. When you do that, and implement programs for several years, things begin to change.

The urban poor are asking just a little comprehension, respect, and support. The Magsaysay Foundation obviously understands this, which is not surprising since it is inspired by the example of Ramon Magsaysay. He commanded respect because he was a simple, humble man who cared for all people as individuals, including the poor, because he believed in their dignity and importance.