Information — timely, accurate information — is the common coin of democratic life. Without it, the debates that animate the talk of citizens and guide them as voters are pointless. For democracy to work, truth must be in the public domain. Yet often it is not. Even democratically elected governments frequently hide or distort information that incriminates or embarrasses them. Because of this, citizens depend on the press to discern what is true and make it public. In the Philippines, this high calling is personified by EUGENIA DURAN APOSTOL.

EUGENIA APOSTOL spent her early years in Sorsogon, Philippines, where she was born in 1925, and later moved to Manila where her father served in the National Assembly. She studied Philosophy and Letters at the University of Santo Tomas and began her career in journalism writing for Catholic magazines. Then, for twenty years, she edited the women’s pages of The Manila Times and The Manila Chronicle, bringing a fresh approach to the “lipstick beat” by appealing to intelligent, civic-minded women readers. When Ferdinand Marcos closed the country’s independent newspapers at the onset of martial law in 1972, APOSTOL found a niche with Women’s Home Companion and later launched a new magazine with the hip name of Mr. & Ms. In 1981, she joined a few brave others in the “mosquito press” and began publishing articles openly critical of the dictatorship. 

The assassination of Marcos’s rival Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino in August 1983 led APOSTOL to abandon restraint. “From then on there was no stopping,” she says. Defying the regime, Mr. & Ms. published sixteen pages of photographs and text depicting the tumultuous public response to the killing. Afterwards, special editions of Mr. and Ms. reported weekly on Marcos abuses and the rising opposition. Emboldened by the revelations, readers snapped up copies by the hundreds of thousands. As the political crisis deepened in late 1985, Apostol rose to meet the need for an independent newspaper. Under her leadership, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported fearlessly on Corazon Aquino’s popular drive for the presidency and its jubilant people-power climax, the EDSA Revolution. 

APOSTOL built the Inquirer‘s reputation on integrity and independence, maintaining a critical distance from Mrs. Aquino’s new administration. She set high professional standards for the industry and required her own reporters to honor the Philippine Journalist’s Code of Ethics. APOSTOL stepped down as the Inquirer‘s publisher in 1994 but reentered the fray in 1999 with The Pinoy Times. This Taglish-language tabloid took up the cudgels against President Joseph Estrada’s assaults on press freedom and responded to public hunger for the truth about his unexplained wealth and wayward leadership. It sold in the millions and buoyed the movement for Estrada’s ouster. But advertisers feared reprisal from the administration and stayed away. When the paper lost money, APOSTOL covered its expenses personally. 

The EDSA Revolution brought many good things but not an end to corruption and misgovernment. APOSTOL concludes from this that “we have to educate our people better.” This is something she is doing through the Foundation for Worldwide People Power, which she founded with friends in 1996. Its programs promote excellence among teachers and call on the spirit of people power to upgrade instruction and facilities in Philippine public schools. 

APOSTOL is legendary among her friends for her passion, wit, and irreverence. And grace: Eggie loves to dance. Reflecting on the momentous role she played in reclaiming her country’s press freedom and restoring democracy, she says. “I was just doing what should have been done. Journalists have to tell the truth.”

In electing EUGENIA DURAN APOSTOL to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes her courageous example in placing the truth-telling press at the center of the struggle for democratic rights and better government in the Philippines.

In 1957, I was thirty-two years old and working as the women’s section editor of the leading daily newspaper of the Philippines. On March 17th of that year, the Philippines was shocked by the news that our President, Ramon Magsaysay, had died in a plane crash near Cebu City. 

The mystery behind that crash has never been solved, although everyone suspected that President Magsaysay was killed because someone thought he was too good and too effective in making the Filipino realize that the common man had a shining value. All we knew was that someone had put a bomb in a crate of Cebu mangoes that was loaded into that plane. Soon after the plane flew over Mount Manunggal in Cebu, it exploded, killing everyone in it except for one newspaperman. 

Whoever planted that bomb did not foresee the reaction of the Rockefeller family of philanthropists to the loss of a beloved and effective President of the Philippines. The Rockefellers were convinced that the legacy of Ramon Magsaysay should not be forgotten and that his exemplary life should be celebrated forever. They proposed, through a generous grant, the perpetuation of his precious ideals. And so, since 1958, the Ramon Magsaysay Award has made Ramon Magsaysay live again not only in his own country but all over Asia. 

To date, Magsaysay’s ideals live in 240 men and women and in sixteen institutions that echo his qualities in government service; public service; community leadership; journalism, literature, and creative communication arts; peace and international understanding; and emergent leadership. That I should be chosen as one of these men and women was far from my wildest dreams. I shall never agree with anyone saying that I am worthy of this Award. But there is one aspect of it that I welcome with open arms: the money that goes with it. Not because I need the money for myself — I am lucky that my late husband left me enough for my own needs — but because the Award money — 2.53 million pesos by the latest conversion rate — will go a long way in helping the Education Revolution which the Foundation for Worldwide People Power launched three years ago. 

This Foundation, which commemorates the People Power we call EDSA I and EDSA II, is our hope in moving Filipinos away from poverty. We go to the schools and help our Department of Education become better qualified and more effective at character formation — so that our children will grow from little “Monchings” [diminutive for “Ramon”] into wonderful and heroic citizens like Ramon Magsaysay.

The brazen corruption of the high and the mighty may grab headlines, but for ordinary people it is the ubiquity of everyday corruption that weighs heaviest. And that demoralizes. Arvind Kejriwal, founder of India’s Parivartan, understands this, which is why his campaign for change begins with the small things. 

As a tax officer with the Indian Revenue Service, ARVIND KEJRIWAL became aware of the many powers that tax officials held over private citizens and how easily these powers could be abused. Indeed, at the tax department, one expected to pay bribes as a matter of course. With a few kindred spirits, KEJRIWAL began to strategize about how to bring an end to this. In 2000, he founded Parivartan, meaning “change.” Parivartan appealed to the tax commissioner to make the tax department more transparent and less capricious. When this failed, it filed Public Interest Litigation directing the department to implement a five-point transparency plan. Eventually, Parivartan held a nonviolent protest, or satyagraha, outside the chief commissioner’s office. Threat of another protest with the press on hand convinced the tax chief to implement the reforms. 

Meanwhile, on leave from his job, KEJRIWAL stationed himself with other Parivartan members outside the electricity department. There they exhorted visitors not to pay bribes and offered to facilitate their dealings with the department for free. Since then, Parivartan has settled 2,500 grievances with the electricity department on behalf of individuals. Some seven hundred more have benefited from the group’s “Don’t pay bribes!” campaign at the tax department. 

Under the Delhi Right to Information Act of 2001, every citizen possesses the right to inspect government documents. KEJRIWAL put the new law to use in Sundernagari, a New Delhi slum where Parivartan was working among the poor. First, the group obtained official reports on all recent public-works projects in the area. Next, it led residents in a “social audit” of sixty-eight projects, stirring the community to action with neighborhood meetings and street plays. Then, in a large public hearing, the residents presented their findings and exposed misappropriations in sixty-four of the projects-embezzlement to the tune of seven million rupees! Today, in Sundernagari, local committees monitor public-works projects block by block, and no project may begin until the details of the contract have been made public. 

The Indian government provides subsidized rations of wheat and rice to poor people through neighborhood ration shops. Records acquired by KEJRIWAL for Sundernagari revealed high levels of theft in the system. In one area, over 90 percent of the grain ration was being skimmed off by shopkeepers in collusion with certain food department officials. When Parivartan investigated this, one of its team members was savagely attacked. In protest, more than five thousand residents of the community held a month long “rations fast.” This and a mass rally riveted public attention, and foot-dragging officials finally moved to clean up the system. 

Now in its seventh year, Parivartan has only ten full-time members. Although KEJRIWALsometimes takes on larger issues such as the successful 2005 campaign challenging a water-privatization plan for New Delhi, he has no plans to expand. He prefers to coordinate Parivartan?s efforts with other like-minded NGOs across India. 

Thirty-eight-year-old KEJRIWAL reminds Indians that the boons of collective action, such as the honest delivery of services, have already been paid for through taxes. Citizens are entitled to them. The spirit of his movement was aptly captured by the women of Sundernagari as they rallied to protest cheating in neighborhood ration shops: “We are not begging from anyone!” they chanted. “We are demanding our rights.”

In electing ARVIND KEJRIWAL to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his activating India’s right-to-information movement at the grassroots, empowering New Delhi’s poorest citizens to fight corruption by holding government answerable to the people.

I bring you greetings from India, the world’s largest democracy. 

I am humbled to be a part of such a distinguished gathering, and am mindful of all the very accomplished people who are part of the family of Magsaysay awardees. Ordinarily, my own credentials would not stand up to the scrutiny of this group, but I take heart from the fact that I stand here today not on my achievements but as a representative of the movement for the people’s right to information, that is thriving and growing in India. This award does not belong to me. It belongs to the entire Right-to-Information movement in India. It belongs to every individual who has fought for transparency in governance. Some of them even faced violence and risked their lives. I stand before you today on behalf of all of them. 

Enactment of the Right to Information law has ushered in a new era in Indian democracy. In a democracy, people are the masters and the governments exist to serve them. But the situation is reverse in practice. Right to Information has tilted the balance of power in favor of ordinary people. 

Starting from a small village in the state of Rajasthan, this movement to empower the common people and make them the real masters in a democratic polity, is now sweeping the country. It is catching the imagination of people in the rural and the urban areas, of the poor and the rich, of the educated and the illiterate, and of the privileged and the oppressed. They all see it as a new awakening, a fresh way of solving the problems of poverty, of hunger, and of disease which have plagued our country, and many other countries of the world, for hundreds of years. They are joined together, for they see this not as a battle between the government and the people, but as a historic battle where good people within and outside the government join hands to battle the corrupt and the apathetic. 

It is a fight for justice, for surely “when people go hungry, it is not food, but justice, that is in short supply”. It is this movement for the right to information that has, in a short span of a few years, challenged the very basis of bureaucratic patronage and corruption that has plagued our society for centuries. The right to information has been widely understood—in cities, towns and villages, by housewives and shopkeepers, by executives and students, by workers and labourers—as our right to demand accountability from the government: you spend OUR money, you give US OUR accounts. And YOU are paid from OUR money, so YOU answer to US. 

Right to Information has emerged as an extremely powerful tool in the hands of ordinary people to fight injustice and corruption. It has given voice to the voiceless. Nannu, a very poor labourer, got his food card without bribes within a few days when he used Right to Information. He was harassed for three months before that. Triveni, another poor woman living in a slum in Delhi, started getting her subsidized food from the government after she used Right to Information. Her food was being siphoned off before that. Right to Information has brought hope to all such people. It has given them the strength to be able to fight injustice. 

Prem Sharma, who is 74 years old, got his passport the day he went to file his RTI application, though it had been denied to him for six months, because he refused to pay bribes. Use of RTI led to roads being made and repaired only for the first time on the ground, though for years they were being made and repaired on paper. It has led to honest officers being protected and the corrupt ones being prosecuted. But, most important of all, it has led the people of India to feel empowered—perhaps for the first time in their long and colourful history—empowered to stand up and demand answers of the government. It has energized the nation and, even as we speak, this energy is spreading like wildfire across the cities, towns and villages of India. It is this movement for the right to information, that I represent as I stand here. It is on behalf of these thousands of people across India, and my immediate associates in Parivartan, that I accept, with great humility, the award that you confer on me today. As a great statesman once famously said: “They are the lions, I only have the privilege to be called upon to roar for them”.

In less than a hundred years, Korea has suffered the loss of its sovereignty, foreign occupation, civil war and partition, and then poverty, dictatorship, and industrialization—all this before South Korea’s dizzying breakthrough to democracy and prosperity in the past two decades. Despite recent successes, PARK WON SOON believes that South Korea still suffers from “lingering authoritarian styles of leadership” and other ills arising from its past. More democracy is the cure. As an activist and institution builder, Park strives to expand South Korea’s democracy by expanding the power of its citizens. 

Born in 1956, PARK grew up under military dictatorship in South Korea. At the age of nineteen, he tasted the hard hand of the state. Arrested for joining a political demonstration, he was imprisoned for four months and expelled from his law course at Seoul National University. Persevering, he passed the bar examinations in 1980 and threw himself headlong into South Korea’s emerging democracy movement. He became a human rights lawyer. Forgoing the rewards of a conventional legal career, he took up the cause of political prisoners and victims of media censorship, torture, and other authoritarian abuses. 

Then, as the political tide began to turn, PARK addressed himself to South Korea’s troubled transition to democracy. In 1994, he helped form People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD). Under PARK’s leadership from 1996, PSPD assiduously monitored the stewardship of the country’s movers and shakers. It exposed the human rights records of lawyers and judges and pressured the judiciary to be “fair in the application of the law;” it advanced legislation banning corrupt practices in government and protecting whistleblowers; it hounded regulatory agencies to investigate fraud and waste in government contracts. PARK’s PSPD also championed the rights of minority shareholders in Korea’s domineering business conglomerates and filed lawsuits against executives for illicit transactions and insider trading. In 2000, it mounted a controversial blacklist campaign naming eighty-six candidates “unfit to run” for seats in parliament. Fifty-nine of them were rejected by voters. By this time, PSPD had become a national force. 

PARK stepped down as head of PSPD in 2002 to lead The Beautiful Foundation, a PSPD offshoot. Aiming to rekindle Korean habits of generosity and to popularize philanthropy, PARK challenged individuals and companies to donate just one percent of their income or time. More than twenty-six thousand people have done so. The Foundation redistributes the money to the needy and to local public-interest groups. Meanwhile, in the Foundation’s chain of Beautiful Stores, volunteers recycle donated goods and clothing for sale to low-income shoppers. 

For PARK WON SOON, philanthropy itself is not really the issue. His is a larger vision: a “just society” in Korea. To achieve this, he says, “we cannot depend on the bureaucracy and businessmen.” Civil society must take the lead. Moreover, Korea today is becoming more complicated. “We are stepping up as the world’s tenth trade power,” he says. “We should be prepared to design our future in the right direction.” PARK is doing just that at his newly established Hope Institute, an independent think tank where ordinary citizens convene to devise pragmatic, policy-oriented ideas to guide and strengthen South Korea’s ongoing democratization. 

Thinking of the rising gulf between South Korea’s rich and poor today, of corruption and abuses of power in public life, and of the moral confusion arising from rapid social change, PARK admits, “We have a long way to go.” His own optimism is based on the power of social movements. “Hope does not fall from the sky,” he says. “We create hope ourselves.” 

In electing PARK WON SOON to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes his principled activism fostering social justice, fair business practices, clean government, and a generous spirit in South Korea’s young democracy.

I am so pleased to be here today, but at the same time, I feel guilty, because I stand alone in this great place without my colleagues who deserve to be here with me. 

I always thought that good work could not be achieved by one person but by a group of people who share a common dream and common goals. This award is a result of not only my work but the work we have done together to make a better world. There are people who really care about our society, people who dream about a new alternative world with all of their being, and people who are willing to be members and contribute money for a common cause and the public interest. 

Indeed these are the people who should be here with me today. These are people who donate their knowledge, wisdom, money, time, and talent for a better society. I would like to share this glorious award with all of them. 

Tonight, I feel light as a feather, because I was awarded this esteemed prize. But I also feel heavy-hearted, because I can sense difficulties and barriers looming in the near future. It will give me more to do than what I have already done. 

The People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and The Beautiful Foundation have both played an important role in Korean society and have changed the lives of Korean people. 

We have walked the path of democratization and humanization in the face of military dictatorship in much the same way as the Filipino people have. We have all come a long way. 

People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, on which I worked from 1994 to 2002, tried to strengthen transparency and accountability in society through various campaigns and strategies, to increase government efficiency and to stop corporate corruption. We also protected small shareholders? rights and challenged the top management of big corporations to take their social responsibilities to heart. 

On the other hand, the Beautiful Foundation, which I served for the last six years, tried to expand the culture of giving in South Korea, and to build the bridge of unity in this divided society. Through our 1% sharing movement, which is such a magic number, shoe-shine boys, peddlers, and many others, poor or middle class, joined the campaign. 

I have always believed and shouted out loud that the world can be changed by citizens’ power. With this catch-phrase, I helped ordinary citizens participate in politics, economics, and social issues and encouraged them to play a significant role in our society. As a result, these collective efforts achieved a field of blooming flowers called participatory democracy ? flowers which have now replaced disinterest and disregard. 

This achievement is, however, just a starting point. This long journey has yet to achieve a deeper and wider democracy, higher humanism, and a more rational and systematic society within and beyond Korean society. And I still dream about reaching these goals in my every waking moment. This is why I felt guilt and heavily burdened when I was informed about winning the Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

I deeply appreciate this award and extend my blessing to the President of the Magsaysay Award Foundation, its trustees, and all you distinguished attendants. 

Today, I regard this most honorable Magsaysay Award as a constant reminder for me to be more diligent and consistent in my political journey with all of my friends — friends just like you. 

Salamat. Thank you very much.

Asia’s urban multitudes are thirsty and ever-growing. Providing them with safe drinking water is a gargantuan task everywhere. But consider Phnom Penh. The Cambodian capital and former French colonial center had only a modest water distribution system to begin with. Bombing, civil war, and social havoc in the early 1970s brought waves of refugees to the city. Then, abruptly in 1975, the triumphant Khmer Rouge banished every person from Phnom Penh and abandoned its already sagging infrastructure to atrophy. When the genocidal regime was driven from power in 1979, the city swelled again, yet little was done to revive its broken-down water system. Then, in 1993, EK SONN CHAN was put in charge. 

As a young engineering graduate, EK SONN CHAN lost his entire family to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. He managed to survive as a farmer. In 1979, he found work at the Phnom Penh municipal abattoir and subsequently rose to be the city’s director of commerce. The water system he inherited in 1993 was barely a system at all. Over the years, its ancient French-laid pipes had been augmented haphazardly into an indecipherable maze of connections. No blueprints had survived the Khmer Rouge, nor had the engineers who understood them. The entire labyrinth was riddled with holes and so porous that disease-laden sewage easily seeped in. EK discovered that 70 percent of the city’s water was lost to leaks or theft. Among the thieves were his own employees as well as military men and other VIPs who profited by selling water to better-off neighborhoods. Poor people paid black marketeers dearly for what was left. The city’s water agency collected fees from only half its users. Not surprisingly, it was losing money. 

EK combed his bloated workforce for the best and brightest and set them to work — locating and repairing the system’s myriad leaks, installing thousands of water meters, and closing hundreds of illegal connections. He installed a computerized billing program, financed by France, and persuaded other international lenders that his agency was a good risk. In 1997, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) became an autonomous public enterprise. With major loans from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the government of Japan, General Director EK SONN CHAN embarked upon a major overhaul. 

He laid 1,500 kilometers of new pipelines and expanded the Authority?s water output by 600 percent. He confronted VIP nonpayers and cut off their water when persuasion failed, achieving a collection rate of 99 percent by 2003. He raised prices, resulting in strong revenues and an enviable reputation for paying the Authority’s debts ahead of schedule. With pricing policies favoring light users as well as subsidized connection fees and installment payment plans, he made cheap water available to the city’s poorest neighborhoods. New and refurbished water-treatment plants ensured that this water met WHO water-safety standards. At the same time, EK professionalized the Authority’s workforce, building its technical capacity and instilling in its employees a work ethic of discipline, competence, and teamwork. 

Today, EK’s clean water reaches virtually all of Phnom Penh’s inner city and he is busy spreading it to the outer reaches of the metropolis. In 2004, the World Bank cited PPWSA for its “dramatic improvement in organization, profitability and organizational performance.” 

Now fifty-six, EK SONN CHAN attributes his drive to “work for the country” to the traumas of Cambodia’s recent past. Patriotism also explains his preference for public utilities over private-sector ones. “The profit made by us,” he says, referring to the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority, “will be profit for our country.” 

In electing EK SONN CHAN to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his exemplary rehabilitation of a ruined public utility, bringing safe drinking water to a million people in Cambodia’s capital city.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

Thirteen years ago, I was appointed by my superior to be the head of the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority — an organization synonymous to corruption, inefficiency and a big bully from the public point of view. No government officer wanted to accept this job; but it challenged me. 

Today, I come here to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for having rehabilitated a ruined public utility, bringing safe drinking water to a million people in Cambodia’s city. This is doubtless the most profound honor I have received. Words cannot express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the Foundation and its officers and trustees for this award. 

I feel humbled by this recognition because I know that I did not do it alone. There are so many other unsung organizations and people who have made their respective contributions to help me achieve my mission at this level. 

Cambodia was devastated by 20 years’ civil war. Many homes were damaged and many lives were lost. Most infrastructure facilities were destroyed. The country under civil war was ruled by a dictatorship. This ravaged our economy and shattered the morale of our people. Surviving from the killing fields, favored with the support of well-meaning individuals and organizations, my colleagues and I have tried to do something for the benefit of our people; and we are able to do it to some extent. 

In receiving this 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, I would like to pay my humble tribute to this great leader, to thank those who have taken part in the selection process for bestowing this honor upon me, and to share it with all the dedicated and selfless men and women of PPWSA, who have contributed so much in bringing PPWSA to where it is today. 

Our mission is by no means complete; we continue to do our best, as this award has propelled me to consolidate and expand my work. Thank you all.

Asia’s vast cities-of-the-poor are visible proof of a hard fact. Despite decades of economic development programs and foreign aid and the earnest efforts of foundations and NGOs, not to mention the sweet promises of politicians, great millions of people in Asia still live in poverty. In the Philippines, nearly half of the country’s 84 million people are credibly said to live below the poverty line. Forty percent of its urban families occupy what the Asian Development Bank calls “makeshift dwellings in informal settlements.” Slums, in other words. ANTONIO MELOTO believes these disheartening facts reveal his country’s failure “to work for the collective good.” As executive director of GAWAD KALINGA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION, he is changing this. 

Born to humble circumstances in Bacolod, Central Philippines, ANTONIO MELOTO attended Ateneo de Manila University on a scholarship and embarked upon a successful career in business. In 1985, an encounter with the Filipino Catholic organization Couples for Christ caused him to reassess his life and priorities. Meloto subsequently joined the organization fulltime and, in 1995, launched a work-with-the-poor ministry in Bagong Silang, a huge squatter relocation site in Metropolitan Manila. He called his ministry GAWAD KALINGA, “to give care.”

In Bagong Silang, MELOTO immersed himself in the lives of slum dwellers. He learned that “a slum environment develops slum behavior.” But he also found goodness, even in the hardened gang members he met there. Slum dwellers needed love and spiritual nourishment, it was clear. But they also needed dignity and decent living conditions. It was not enough to pray for them, he decided. “We should do something!” 

MELOTO decided to build houses. Drawing support and volunteers from Couples for Christ, he began transforming the neediest area of Bagong Silang into a viable neighborhood with safe, sturdy, and attractive homes — the first GAWAD KALINGA village. In doing so, he formulated guidelines for later GAWAD KALINGA projects. New homes would be allotted only to the poorest families. They could not be sold. And although the beneficiaries would not have to pay for their new homes, they would have to help GAWAD KALINGA’s volunteers build them and to abide by neighborhood covenants. As Bagong Silang Village blossomed, MELOTO identified new sites for GAWAD KALINGA villages and spread word of the project through Couples for Christ. He solicited donations and volunteers passionately, offering “see-for-yourself” exposures to convince skeptics. Through the ANCOP (Answering the Cry of the Poor) Foundation he brought expatriate Filipinos into GAWAD KALINGA’s growing web of partners and supporters. Meanwhile, he introduced health, education, and livelihood components to GAWAD KALINGA villages to equip the occupants with skills and resources to rise in life. 

As word of GAWAD KALINGA’s hopeful project circulated at home and abroad, it tapped into a reservoir of longing. Many Filipinos despaired over their country’s stubborn poverty and yearned to do something about it. They flocked to the movement, convinced by Meloto that their money and efforts could really make a difference. Donations soared and GAWAD KALINGA villages began to proliferate throughout the Philippines. 

MELOTO guided the organization to embrace all comers. “We provide the framework,” he says. “We also provide the principles; we also provide the spirit. But anyone can come in.” This philosophy led GAWAD KALINGA into cooperative projects with corporations, civic organizations, families, schools, and government agencies as well as over three hundred governors and mayors. When typhoons destroyed thousands of homes on Luzon in 2005, for example, GAWAD KALINGA joined a dozen government agencies and private organizations to build forty thousand new ones. In Mindanao, GAWAD KALINGA-led “Peace Builds,” fostered by local mayors and built by Christian, Muslim, and indigenous-Filipino volunteers, resulted in hundreds of new homes for displaced Muslim Filipinos. 

It is often said that ANTONIO MELOTO is the face of GAWAD KALINGA. But the movement he spawned is now much bigger than himself. In truth, GAWAD KALINGA has thousands of faces. These are faces of every Filipino ethnicity, faith, and social class?of donors at home and abroad who are providing the money and land for new villages; of volunteers across the Philippines who are joining their families, and friends, and schoolmates, and officemates, and fellow church members to build houses and to provide GAWAD KALINGA villages with training and services; of executives, lawyers, doctors, architects, and other professionals. These are also the faces of over two hundred thousand grateful beneficiaries. 

Today more than eight hundred fifty GAWAD KALINGA villages span the Philippines. Alongside those sponsored by expatriate Filipinos, such as Norway Village, Swiss Village, and North Carolina Village, there are more than one hundred others sponsored by major corporations. And this is just the beginning. GAWAD KALINGA is committed to building seven thousand new communities by the year 2010.

GAWAD KALINGA neighborhoods typically contain fifty-to-one-hundred brightly painted homes and are conspicuously tidy and clean. There are flowers and plants and pleasant walkways, plus a school, a livelihood center, and a multipurpose hall. Participating families are mentored by a Couples for Christ caretaker team that organizes volunteers to assist in education, health, and livelihood projects. In many, clinics provide routine medical care. Through a self-governing neighborhood association in each village, residents are becoming stewards of their own stable and vibrant communities. 

The objective is transformation. MELOTO recently described a mature GAWAD KALINGA village as “a beautiful middle-class community. Crime has virtually disappeared. Former street children are now in school. The idle have been motivated to find employment and are now leading productive lives.” As for those who contribute to Gawad Kalinga and its mission, they are transformed, too, by their acts of goodwill and the warm camaraderie of bayanihan, “working together.”

Now fifty-six, the lanky, self-effacing MELOTO says, “I believe in the immense potential of the Filipino.” Thinking of people like himself who formerly ignored the poverty around them, he says, “Before, we were part of the problem.” “Now,” he adds, smiling, “we are part of the solution.” 

In electing the GAWAD KALINGA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION  and its family of donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes their harnessing the faith and generosity of Filipinos the world over to confront poverty in their homeland and to provide every Filipino the dignity of a decent home and neighborhood; and in electing ANTONIO MELOTO to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his inspiring Filipinos to believe with pride that theirs can be a nation without slums.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

I am privileged to represent the many faceless heroes of Gawad Kalinga who are giving of themselves without counting the cost, without being recognized, without looking to gaining anything for themselves, except the satisfaction of having served God, society and our nation. And I am honored to speak on behalf of the poor of our land who are also the unsung heroes of Gawad Kalinga. They inspire us with their quiet dignity, their joyful simplicity, their perseverance despite the seeming hopelessness of their situation. They are the future and the strength of our nation. 

Today we live in a world where there is great poverty, and where poverty has inevitably led to crime and corruption, to instability and insurgency, and even to terrorism. Many people are lost, feeling helpless and hopeless, dreading what else the future may bring. But this is not how life was meant to be, for we live in a world of beauty and abundance. But due to selfishness and injustice, it is the ugliness of poverty that we see all around us. 

There is a way out. This is when we realize that the poor have dignity, as children of God. This is when we think less of ourselves, and begin to serve the least among us. This is when we begin to really care and share. This is when we realize we are our brother’s keeper, and begin to love and help the poor. 

We in Gawad Kalinga are privileged to be among those who are striving to make a difference in the life of our nation. We are building beautiful and peaceful communities among the poor. In this effort, we are harnessing all sectors of Philippine society, and in doing so, we strive to unite rich and poor, Christians and Muslims, the right and the left, the mighty and the lowly, the haves and the have-nots. Gawad Kalinga, in the spirit of bayanihan, is the collective work of everyone who is willing to respond to the call to heroism in building a nation. 

Our vision is a Philippines where there is no one in need, where all will have an equitable share in the abundance of the land, where Filipinos will be brothers, moving as heroes who will rebuild the nation and bring it to a time of peace and prosperity. And as we rebuild our land, we look to the other nations of the world that also experience poverty, oppression and injustice, and strive to share with them what we have learned. We thank the people of Cambodia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea for welcoming us and giving us the privilege of building communities among their poor. We in Gawad Kalinga humbly look for more opportunities to be bearers of light and hope to a world in darkness. 

It is a great honor for us in Gawad Kalinga to be conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, and to be the first organization to be given this Award in this category. Indeed, Gawad Kalinga is a movement that aspires to lead our nation to greatness through the heroism of every Filipino. May this award inspire not only our faceless workers in Gawad Kalinga, but every Filipino, including especially the poor, to desire to be part of this great effort at building a nation. And furthermore, may this award give hope to the poor and oppressed of the world, to know that together we can build a better world, one of caring and sharing, a world where justice reigns, where we are our brother?s keeper, a world that is at peace.

Asia’s vast cities-of-the-poor are visible proof of a hard fact. Despite decades of economic development programs and foreign aid and the earnest efforts of foundations and NGOs, not to mention the sweet promises of politicians, great millions of people in Asia still live in poverty. In the Philippines, nearly half of the country’s 84 million people are credibly said to live below the poverty line. Forty percent of its urban families occupy what the Asian Development Bank calls “makeshift dwellings in informal settlements.” Slums, in other words. ANTONIO MELOTO believes these disheartening facts reveal his country’s failure “to work for the collective good.” As executive director of GAWAD KALINGA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION, he is changing this. 

Born to humble circumstances in Bacolod, Central Philippines, ANTONIO MELOTO attended Ateneo de Manila University on a scholarship and embarked upon a successful career in business. In 1985, an encounter with the Filipino Catholic organization Couples for Christ caused him to reassess his life and priorities. Meloto subsequently joined the organization fulltime and, in 1995, launched a work-with-the-poor ministry in Bagong Silang, a huge squatter relocation site in Metropolitan Manila. He called his ministry GAWAD KALINGA, “to give care.”

In Bagong Silang, MELOTO immersed himself in the lives of slum dwellers. He learned that “a slum environment develops slum behavior.” But he also found goodness, even in the hardened gang members he met there. Slum dwellers needed love and spiritual nourishment, it was clear. But they also needed dignity and decent living conditions. It was not enough to pray for them, he decided. “We should do something!” 

MELOTO decided to build houses. Drawing support and volunteers from Couples for Christ, he began transforming the neediest area of Bagong Silang into a viable neighborhood with safe, sturdy, and attractive homes — the first GAWAD KALINGA village. In doing so, he formulated guidelines for later GAWAD KALINGA projects. New homes would be allotted only to the poorest families. They could not be sold. And although the beneficiaries would not have to pay for their new homes, they would have to help GAWAD KALINGA’s volunteers build them and to abide by neighborhood covenants. As Bagong Silang Village blossomed, MELOTO identified new sites for GAWAD KALINGA villages and spread word of the project through Couples for Christ. He solicited donations and volunteers passionately, offering “see-for-yourself” exposures to convince skeptics. Through the ANCOP (Answering the Cry of the Poor) Foundation he brought expatriate Filipinos into GAWAD KALINGA’s growing web of partners and supporters. Meanwhile, he introduced health, education, and livelihood components to GAWAD KALINGA villages to equip the occupants with skills and resources to rise in life. 

As word of GAWAD KALINGA’s hopeful project circulated at home and abroad, it tapped into a reservoir of longing. Many Filipinos despaired over their country’s stubborn poverty and yearned to do something about it. They flocked to the movement, convinced by Meloto that their money and efforts could really make a difference. Donations soared and GAWAD KALINGA villages began to proliferate throughout the Philippines. 

MELOTO guided the organization to embrace all comers. “We provide the framework,” he says. “We also provide the principles; we also provide the spirit. But anyone can come in.” This philosophy led GAWAD KALINGA into cooperative projects with corporations, civic organizations, families, schools, and government agencies as well as over three hundred governors and mayors. When typhoons destroyed thousands of homes on Luzon in 2005, for example, GAWAD KALINGA joined a dozen government agencies and private organizations to build forty thousand new ones. In Mindanao, GAWAD KALINGA-led “Peace Builds,” fostered by local mayors and built by Christian, Muslim, and indigenous-Filipino volunteers, resulted in hundreds of new homes for displaced Muslim Filipinos. 

It is often said that ANTONIO MELOTO is the face of GAWAD KALINGA. But the movement he spawned is now much bigger than himself. In truth, GAWAD KALINGA has thousands of faces. These are faces of every Filipino ethnicity, faith, and social class?of donors at home and abroad who are providing the money and land for new villages; of volunteers across the Philippines who are joining their families, and friends, and schoolmates, and officemates, and fellow church members to build houses and to provide GAWAD KALINGA villages with training and services; of executives, lawyers, doctors, architects, and other professionals. These are also the faces of over two hundred thousand grateful beneficiaries. 

Today more than eight hundred fifty GAWAD KALINGA villages span the Philippines. Alongside those sponsored by expatriate Filipinos, such as Norway Village, Swiss Village, and North Carolina Village, there are more than one hundred others sponsored by major corporations. And this is just the beginning. GAWAD KALINGA is committed to building seven thousand new communities by the year 2010. 

GAWAD KALINGA neighborhoods typically contain fifty-to-one-hundred brightly painted homes and are conspicuously tidy and clean. There are flowers and plants and pleasant walkways, plus a school, a livelihood center, and a multipurpose hall. Participating families are mentored by a Couples for Christ caretaker team that organizes volunteers to assist in education, health, and livelihood projects. In many, clinics provide routine medical care. Through a self-governing neighborhood association in each village, residents are becoming stewards of their own stable and vibrant communities. 

The objective is transformation. MELOTO recently described a mature GAWAD KALINGA village as “a beautiful middle-class community. Crime has virtually disappeared. Former street children are now in school. The idle have been motivated to find employment and are now leading productive lives.” As for those who contribute to Gawad Kalinga and its mission, they are transformed, too, by their acts of goodwill and the warm camaraderie of bayanihan, “working together.”

Now fifty-six, the lanky, self-effacing MELOTO says, “I believe in the immense potential of the Filipino.” Thinking of people like himself who formerly ignored the poverty around them, he says, “Before, we were part of the problem.” “Now,” he adds, smiling, “we are part of the solution.” 

In electing the GAWAD KALINGA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION  and its family of donors, volunteers, and beneficiaries to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes their harnessing the faith and generosity of Filipinos the world over to confront poverty in their homeland and to provide every Filipino the dignity of a decent home and neighborhood; and in electing ANTONIO MELOTO to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his inspiring Filipinos to believe with pride that theirs can be a nation without slums.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

It is a great honor for me to receive this award in behalf of our countrymen who have not given up hope for our country and have not stopped caring for our people. 

We face the challenge of bringing our nation out of poverty from 400 years of feudalism that has rendered 70% of our people landless — depriving them of dignity, security and the motivation to aspire for a better quality of life. We also face the challenge of liberating our people from the slave mentality borne out of our colonial past, and of restoring their self-respect and confidence to succeed and live with dignity in our own country and anywhere in the world. 

We have produced many great men and women who love this country. They have sacrificed their lives to liberate our people from our enslavement to the past. But it has taken us a while to get our act together. We looked for solutions from government, we relied on great leaders and felt the frustration when they were unable to solve our problems, particularly poverty and corruption, which are massive and widespread. We did not have the confidence to look for solutions in ourselves nor the perseverance to bring out the best in one another. We did not have the boldness to demand heroism from ourselves as Filipinos nor the passion to inspire heroism in others. 

This award is a celebration of ordinary Filipinos who have found their strength, their voice and their power because they have decided to stop blaming one another and decided instead to work together. Gawad Kalinga is a concrete, everyday expression of people power on the ground. This country is being transformed community after community, town after town, through multisectoral cooperation-following the path of peace. It is the bayanihan spirit that is moving Filipinos all over the world to re-connect with their motherland and help the towns and provinces where they come from. Today this award honors the faith and the sacrifice of members of Couples for Christ who started this movement and have lovingly served the GK communities as caretaker teams. We also honor the residents of the Gawad Kalinga communities coming from the poorest of the poor who have regained their dignity?are moving from beneficiaries to benefactors and are helping themselves and one another. 

We thank our partners from universities and schools, from civic and religious organizations, from NGOs and from corporations who have transcended business rivalry to build our nation. We thank government, both national and local, for proving to us that they can rise above partisanship for the greater good. We thank Filipinos abroad who have not stopped loving our country and have given us their continuing and invaluable support. We thank non-Filipinos who believe in Gawad Kalinga and see it as a model to help reduce poverty and resolve conflict. 

I thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for honoring the sacrifice of ordinary Filipinos and for recognizing Gawad Kalinga as a viable template and a vehicle of hope for other developing countries like the Philippines. 

I thank my family for loving me?for sharing my love for my country, and my poor countrymen, and my passion for Gawad Kalinga. 

I thank God for His beautiful plan that I was born a Filipino.

Cataracts, bane of the aging, are like clouds that gather over the eyes. They are the most common cause of blindness in Asia. In Nepal alone some half a million people are affected, the majority of whom live in remote areas where the curse of blindness is magnified by a harsh terrain and pervasive poverty. Yet, most of these people need not be blind at all, says Dr. SANDUK RUIT. Only the absence of medical care condemns them to darkness. RUIT, an eye surgeon and medical director of the Tilganga Eye Centre in Kathmandu, wants them to see again. 

SANDUK RUIT was born in a mountain area of Nepal so poor and remote that the nearest school was eleven days away, by foot. Diligence brought him a scholarship to be educated in India. When he was seventeen, his older sister died of tuberculosis and this painful loss led him to medicine. Upon completing medical school in India, he returned to Nepal as a government health officer. Following an assignment with the WHO Nepal Blindness Survey in 1980, he completed a residency in ophthalmology. Later, in Australia, he learned from his friend and mentor Dr. Fred Hollows the latest techniques in cataract microsurgery using implanted intraocular lenses. By 1988, he was introducing the new techniques in Nepal. 

There, RUIT faced the resistance of local eye surgeons. He patiently taught them the new procedures and began to win converts. With backing from the Nepal Eye Program Australia, he began trekking to Nepal’s far-flung towns to conduct eye camps, on-the-spot surgeries in which he almost instantly restored the sight of grateful country folk, hundreds at a time. While doing so, RUIT devised techniques to achieve hospital-quality standards of precision and sterility under makeshift conditions. These included his now-famous suture-less procedure that speeds cataract surgery and reduces patients? recovery time. 

RUIT opened the Tilganga Eye Centre (TEC) in 1994. It has become the hub of an ambitious expansion of eye-care services. In partnership with the Himalayan Cataract Project, TEC today manages six regional primary eye-care centers in Nepal. It operates Nepal’s only successful eye bank. It trains eye-care paramedics, medical residents, and nurses as well as visiting surgeons from Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia who come to learn Dr. RUIT’s techniques. It also manufactures extremely high-quality intraocular lenses for surgery and makes these once exorbitant implants-nearly 1.5 million of them so far-available to needy recipients in some fifty countries for less than US $5.00 apiece. Meanwhile, the Centre treats three thousand patients a week and has performed more than ninety thousand operations since its inception. Surgery at TEC is inexpensive and prorated according to ability to pay; the poor pay nothing at all. 

Today, RUIT’s mobile eye camps have expanded to China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and even to North Korea, where in June 2006 he and his team performed sight-restoring surgery on over 1,000 patients in six days. 

More than five hundred surgeons across Asia have now learned Dr. RUIT’s path-breaking techniques. “We Nepalese have never been known to give anything to other parts of the world,” he says. “I feel proud that we have given this expertise to many countries.”

The good doctor RUIT is famous for his stamina at the operating table and can perform one hundred surgeries in a single day. At fifty-one, he remains inspired by the joyful satisfaction of giving the gift of sight, especially to the poor. “Everyone deserves good vision,” he says. “There can be no children of a lesser god.”

In electing SANDUK RUIT to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his placing Nepal at the forefront of developing safe, effective, and economical procedures for cataract surgery, enabling the needlessly blind in even the poorest countries to see again.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

I would like to express my heart-felt gratitude to the Trustees of the Foundation for selecting me as the winner of the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. 

I am extremely excited and humbled by this honour given to me. 

On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of blinded cataract patients for whom I have played a small part in restoring their sight and giving them dignity in their lives, I accept this prestigious Award. 

Cataract continues to be the most common cause of blindness worldwide. It is estimated that nearly eighty million people are blind with cataract, and 90% of cataracts are found in the developing world. For nearly twenty years now, we have been working to provide a successful model of high-volume cataract surgery with a good vision outcome to be made available and accessible to the developing world. This required continuing innovations both in eye service management and eye surgery. 

Extensive research and development was done to produce low-cost and robust equipment, such as portable operating microscopes and YAG lasers. We have been successful in manufacturing state-of-the-art intra-ocular lenses locally for a unit cost of US $4, which was available elsewhere for US $100. The logistics, economics and efficiency of cataract surgery in its entirety was addressed to suit the large backlog of cataract blindness in poorer countries. 

Since then, this system has been introduced successfully to many countries crossing geographical and political boundaries. The training of surgeons, the establishment of eye centres and the conduct of model workshops have now spread to more than fifty countries globally. 

I once again would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, as this Award will certainly give me more credibility and challenge me to continue my unfinished agenda. I would also like to acknowledge the support of that most wonderful group of people whom I work with at the Tilganga Eye Centre in Nepal, and our partners, the Fred Hollows Foundation and the Himalayan Cataract Project.