Bangladeshi, Pakistani among Ramon Magsaysay awardees

A Bangladeshi vaccine scientist and a microfinance pioneer from Pakistan were the among the five recipients of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award -- regarded as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize -- announced on Tuesday.

Apart from Dr Firdausi Qadri from Bangladesh and Muhammad Amjad Saqib from Pakistan, the other winners are Filipino fisher and community environmentalist Roberto Ballon, American Steven Muncy for humanitarian work and refugee assistance and Indonesian torch bearer for investigative journalism, Watchdoc.

Qadri, 70, who has a doctorate from Liverpool University, UK, joined International Centre For Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh in 1988. Today she is credited with developing affordable oral cholera vaccine and the typhoid conjugate vaccine for adults, children, and infants. Most of her work is focused in congested slum areas of developing countries. She is being recognised for “her passion and lifelong devotion to the scientific profession; her vision of building the human and physical infrastructure that will benefit the coming generation of Bangladeshi scientists, women scientists in particular, and her untiring contributions to vaccine development, advanced biotechnological therapeutics and critical research that has been saving millions of precious lives,” the award citation said.

Pakistani development worker Muhammad Amjad Saqib, 64, has developed the “first-of-itskind” interest-and-collateral-free microfinance programme, Akhuwat, which uses places of worship to disburse zero-interest loans, recording a phenomenal loan repayment rate of 99.9 per cent. Akhuwat has taken up a vast array of social support programmes in education, health services, “clothes bank”, anti-social discrimination and COVID-19 emergency aid. Saqib is being recognised for “his intelligence and compassion that enabled him to create the largest microfinance institution in Pakistan”, read the citation.