Saifuddin Ahmed wins Anwarul Quadir Prize

Saifuddin Ahmed, general manager of an agricultural organisation in Bangladesh, has won the first Anwarul Quadir Prize for his essay on Innovations in Bangladesh, a press release said.
The new annual essay contest is sponsored by the Harvard University's Centre for International Development and the Anwarul Quadir Foundation of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He will share the first prize of $25,000 with Anastasia M Telesetsky, an environmental lawyer and former anthropologist who lives in San Francisco.
The promises of the two prize-winning essays are: the lives of rural people of Bangladesh can be improved by utilising absentee-owned fallow land more effectively and by employing the vitamin-rich fruits and leaves of the indigenous moringa tree, the release said.
Saifuddin seeks to improve the productivity of farmers. His winning proposal creates an innovative way of managing the absentee-owned land and generating large-scale employment and the production of cash crops.
Telesetsky seeks to empower rural villagers, especially women. Her project proposes promoting the use of moringa oleifara, an indigenous but not widely-cultivated nutritious plant, through community-bases, small-scale gardens in low-income Bangladeshi communities.
A total of 141 essays were submitted from more than a dozen countries and ranged in focus from healthcare to energy to micro-finance solutions.
Brac University Vice Chancellor Jamilur Reza Chowdhury, Advocate Sara Hossain, and Director of Enterprise Development Company Ltd, Dhaka, assisted the judging panel in its assessments, the release added.
The Quadir family established the Anwarul Quadir Foundation in 2004 at the initiative of Iqbal Z Quadir, who taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and now teaches at MIT.
The Foundation promotes economic and social progress in Bangladesh by encouraging innovations that empower its citizens.