This summer I return to the person FAZLE ABED -whose knowhow made the greaest impression on me. Thats through communities supporting hunders of million peo[ples lives. Somnetime as a maths/tech guiy, its easy to get confused with tech wizardry. Of course its the big magic of the futiure so to speak but if our 8 billion nbeings have lost touch with nartyres' evolutiponary desgn , there is no future toi generate...
. Just to summarise my perspective of Fazle Abed. He entrepreneurially changed so many things - starting with totally new model of aid- and it all built piece on piece so I havent yet found a good way to share it. I was fortunate to get unique perspective of Fazle Abed. The Japan Ambassador to Dhaka arranged 2 brainstorming dinners chaired by sir fazle abed soon after my father (The Economist's Norman Macrae) died in 2010. My father had started cataloguing Asia Rising Models in the Economist 1962- these were endorsed by 3 people JFK, Prince Charles and Japan Emperor's Award. Abed's first surprise at dinner was to say he wished microcreditsummit had been called microeducationsummit. He saw his work as hundreds of millions of womens achievement empowered by overall hiring over 100,000 Paulo Freire educators/servant leaders in village sme skills coaches . It is probably easiest to catalogue his contribution in 3 parts.1972 To 1996 all work was with villagers mothers and daughters. who had no access to electricity. Uniquely he worked on clusters of 100000 villagers at a time to iterate and fast proof concepts Part 2 began when 25 years of trusted partners from 1996 brought villagers mobile and solar, abed raced to do two things first. Design nation wide supply chain leadership in about 15 markets - mostly food but also nationwide supply of 10 most basic non prescription medicine. and every community component of bottom up investing It was the meds supply chain which he built rural health microfranchise service with - mothers would litteraly doordash meds to 300 homes each. become most trusted medical networkers. This scaled nationwide and across humid china because there were 2 things infant oral rehydration and vaccination that abed designed 1972-1982 which Unicef made grants to both across bangladesh and across china. These health interventions added 15 or more years to total life expectancy. In return rural china of 1970s/80s gave abed best rice varieties etc. Early on in this 2nd phase 2001 abed founded what he wanted to be the most collaborative open university in the world. he believed he could help design solutions eg play schools that 50 or even 200 countries needed and could best scale through female worldwide graduates beyond separate alumni groups. It was this idea's 2010s version that abed spent one whole dinner describing - his other dinner finding partners for the largest cashless bank in the world in population terms. these 2 dinners started 16 visits to bangladesh including abeds 80th birthday party 2016 through which my family and i tried to sponsor a different graduate student each time. Abed thought he had fixed some of the world's optimal partners to succeed him but at least on the university side the combination of trump, putin , covid has stopped what he meant by sharing sdg graduates without borders. Enter the ITU and www.metaversprize.org - i am sure if Abed was around he would invite every partner to help as many teams join in this competition as it also helps guterres digital UN2 roadmapping and geneva itu advance UN2.0. Abed students and I try to file his 50 years of collaboration solutions by goals 1-5 and other at www.abedmooc.com but last 5 years has caused chaos in dhaka and elsewhere so I dont know what to do next with Abed knowhow!!
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