悼念:你從未聽說過的最具影響力的反貧困斗士

In Memoriam: The Most Influential Poverty Fighter You've Never Heard Of

悼念:你從未聽說過的最具影響力的反貧困斗士

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed is the award-winning founder of one of the largest nongovernmental aid groups in the world. It's called BRAC, and it operates in 11 countries across Africa and Asia. On Friday Abed's colleagues at BRAC announced that he has died. He was 84 and was being treated for a brain tumor. In 2016 NPR interviewed Abed. In his memory we are re-posting that story.

法茲爾·哈桑·阿布德先生是世界上最大的非政府援助組織之一的獲獎創(chuàng)始人。它被稱為BRAC，它在非洲和亞洲的11個國家開展業(yè)務。周五，阿布德在BRAC的同事宣布他去世了。他現(xiàn)年84歲，正在接受腦瘤治療。2016年，NPR采訪了阿布德。為了紀念他，我們重新發(fā)布了這個故事。

He's a Bangladeshi who's been knighted by the Queen of England. A former accountant who left an executive position at Shell Oil to devote himself to the world's poorest. And when it comes to eliminating poverty, he may be the most influential man you've never heard of. Meet Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and head of a nongovernmental international development organization called BRAC. Today the University of Michigan honors Abed, who is 80, with its Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global Public Health.

他是孟加拉人，被英國女王封為爵士。他曾是一名會計師，離開了殼牌石油公司(Shell Oil)的高管職位，投身于世界上最貧窮的人。說到消除貧困，他可能是你從未聽說過的最有影響力的人。來認識一下法茲爾·哈桑·阿布德先生，他是一個叫做BRAC的非政府國際發(fā)展組織的創(chuàng)始人和負責人。今天，密歇根大學授予80歲的Abed全球公共衛(wèi)生小托馬斯·弗朗西斯勛章。

We took the occasion to find out more about what he's learned during his 40 years in the field — and how one of his ideas might end up driving the 21st century global effort to eradicate extreme poverty.

我們借此機會進一步了解他在這一領域40年里所學到的東西，以及他的一個想法如何可能最終推動21世紀全球消除極端貧困的努力。

Today BRAC is one of the world's largest anti-poverty NGOs — with 115,000 employees in 12 countries offering some 138 million people services including education, micro-loans, job training and health care. But Abed's ambitions were modest when he started the group that would become BRAC back in 1970.

如今，BRAC是世界上最大的反貧困非政府組織之一，在12個國家擁有11.5萬名員工，為約1.38億人提供教育、小額貸款、職業(yè)培訓和醫(yī)療保健等服務。但是當阿布德在1970年創(chuàng)立了BRAC這個組織的時候，他的野心并不大。

A cyclone had just hit Bangladesh — then still known as East Pakistan — killing more than 300,000 and leaving many more homeless. Abed was an accountant by training and says his own family had been comfortably off. But "growing up in rural Bangladesh I had seen poverty all around me and it had always affected me to see it."

一場颶風剛剛襲擊了當時仍被稱為東巴基斯坦的孟加拉國，造成30多萬人死亡，更多的人無家可歸。Abed是一名會計出身，他說他自己的家庭已經(jīng)很富裕了。但是“我在孟加拉國農村長大，我看到了我周圍的貧窮，看到它總是讓我受到影響。”

Now, at the sight of so much death and suffering wrought by the cyclone — there were corpses floating in the bay — "I was really shaken." So he started a group of about two dozen volunteers to help people rebuild. Within months it morphed into a more permanent effort as East Pakistan became embroiled in a war to secede from Pakistan, and, by 1972, achieved independence as Bangladesh.

現(xiàn)在，看到颶風造成了這么多的死亡和痛苦——海灣里漂浮著尸體——“我真的嚇壞了。”因此，他成立了一個由二十多名志愿者組成的小組來幫助人們重建家園。幾個月后，隨著東巴基斯坦卷入一場脫離巴基斯坦的戰(zhàn)爭，它演變成了一種更持久的努力，并在1972年以孟加拉國的身份獲得獨立。

"There were 10 million refugees starting to go back to Bangladesh and I decided it's time for me to help independent Bangladesh," Abed recalls. He quit his job at Shell and sold a house that he owned in the UK to raise the money to pay a small staff of full-time employees. Initially he named his new organization the Bangladesh Relief Assistance Committee.

“有1000萬難民開始返回孟加拉國，我決定是時候幫助獨立的孟加拉國了，”阿布德回憶說。他辭去了殼牌(Shell)的工作，賣掉了自己在英國擁有的一棟房子，籌集資金支付一小部分全職員工的工資。最初，他將他的新組織命名為孟加拉救濟援助委員會。

But he soon decided it was not enough to focus on rebuilding from the cyclone and the war. "You know people were so poor I decided I would have to commit myself for the long haul to get poverty reduced in Bangladesh." So he renamed the group the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.

但他很快就意識到，僅僅專注于颶風和戰(zhàn)爭后的重建是不夠的。“你知道人們是如此的貧窮，所以我決定要為減少孟加拉國的貧困做出長期的努力。”因此，他將該組織改名為孟加拉農村發(fā)展委員會。

Among his early goals was to tackle the extraordinarily high rate of infant and child mortality in Bangladesh — almost one-fourth were dying before their fifth birthday. One of his greatest successes was a push from 1986 to 1990 to expand childhood immunizations. With funding from a range of sources including the British and Australian governments, says Abed, over those four years alone BRAC helped increase the share of children who were vaccinated against, for example, tuberculosis from 4 percent to 91 percent.

他的早期目標之一是解決孟加拉國嬰兒和兒童死亡率極高的問題——將近四分之一的嬰兒在五歲前死亡。他最大的成功之一就是從1986年到1990年推動擴大兒童免疫接種。阿布德說，在包括英國和澳大利亞政府在內的一系列來源的資助下，僅在這四年中，BRAC就幫助接種了結核病疫苗的兒童比例從4%增加到91%。