Brac Founder and Chairperson Fazle Hasan Abed will be honoured with knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his services in tackling poverty and empowering the poor.
Abed’s name was added to the queen’s new year honours list released on Thursday and he would be appointed knight commander of the most distinguished order of Saint Michael and Saint George.
He is the first person of Bangladeshi origin to receive the honour from the British Crown since 1947.
Abed receives knighthood for his work spanning four decades in education, health, human rights and social development and for bringing financial services to the doorstep of millions of the poor in an effort to eradicate poverty in Bangladesh and countries in Asia and Africa.
On receiving the news, Abed said he was humbled by the honour.
Abed is the second person in his family to be honoured with a knighthood. His grand uncle, Justice Nawab Sir Syed Shamsul Huda, was knighted by the British Crown in 1913.
Fazle Hasan Abed was born in 1936 in Baniachong of Habiganj district. After matriculation from Pabna Zilla School and higher secondary education from Dhaka College, he attended Glasgow University to study Naval Architecture.
On returning home, he joined Shell Oil Company. While in Shell, the devastating cyclone of 1970 hit the coastal regions of Bangladesh, killing 300,000 people, which had a profound effect on Abed.
When independence war started, circumstances forced Abed to leave the country. He found refuge in England, where he set up Action Bangladesh to lobby for his country’s independence with the governments of Europe.
When the war ended in December 1971, Abed returned to Bangladesh and decided to use the funds he had generated from selling his flat in London to initiate his own.
He selected the remote region of Sulla in northeastern Bangladesh to start his work. This work led him and his organisation, Brac.
In 2002, Brac went international by taking its range of development interventions to Afghanistan. Since then, Brac has expanded to a total of eight countries across Asia and Africa.
Its work has been recognised internationally through awards such as the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2008 as well as the Swadhinata Puroshkar in 2007.
For his contribution to society, Abed received Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1980, the Unicef Maurice Pate Award in 1992, the Olof Palme Prize in 2001, the UNDP Mahbub ul Haq Award for Outstanding Contribution in Human Development in 2004 and the Inaugural Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2007.
He is a founding member of Ashoka’s prestigious Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. Abed also received several honorary degrees including Doctor of Humane Letters from Yale University in 2007, Doctor of Laws from Columbia University in 2008 and Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford in 2009.
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