The Daily Star, 21 March 2022:

“It hardly needs saying that the towering personality of Sir Fazle Hasan Abed left its indelible mark on BRAC’s vision, mission and programmes in all the areas of development in which the organisation has been engaged. Education, in its institutional forms as well as in a generic sense, was seen by Abed as the key to empowerment and capacity-building of people, so that they can exercise choices and make decisions in shaping their own lives.

In September 2019, I approached Abed Bhai with a request to write the foreword of a book on education in South Asia, which two of my colleagues and I had been writing. I handed him some notes with great hesitation, hoping that he would read these at his leisure and give his observations and guidance for a final text. I knew by then about his serious and potentially terminal illness.

On that September morning, he seemed to be in good spirits. The 2019 Yidan Prize for Education, arguably the most prestigious and certainly the largest in monetary terms (valued at USD 4 million), had been announced the previous day. He took a look at the first few pages of the notes, and beyond all my expectations, started to glance through the pages, making occasional comments and sometimes asking questions. He spent almost an hour on the notes, making observations and offering suggestions.”

Read the full article here.