Kamal Ahmad (born 1965) is a Bangladesh-born, now U.S. national, educator and social entrepreneur. He led the creation of the Asian University for Women located in Chittagong, Bangladesh in 2006. [1] [2] [3]
Kamal Ahmad (born 1965) is a Bangladesh-born, now U.S. national, educator and social entrepreneur. He led the creation of the Asian University for Women located in Chittagong, Bangladesh in 2006. [1] [2] [3]
Ahmad was born in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to a family of educators.
At age 14, Ahmad established a series of internationally funded afternoon schools for adolescents who served as domestic workers in Dhaka. [4] [5] [6]
Ahmad moved to the U.S. in 1980 to attend Phillips Exeter Academy. At Exeter, he led the Third World Society and the Student-Faculty Committee on Corporate Responsibility which focused on the question of corporate divestment from apartheid-era South Africa. Ahmad entered Harvard College in 1983. As a freshman, Ahmad founded and managed the Overseas Development Network, a consortium of 70 university student groups across the United States dedicated to the promotion of international development projects. [7] [8] [9] In 1987, Ahmad won Time magazine's second annual College Achievement Award for "20 of the most outstanding juniors in America." [10]
Ahmad's father was Professor Kamaluddin Ahmad, a famed biochemist who pioneered the study of biochemistry and nutritional sciences in the Indian subcontinent. [11] [12]
Ahmad's grandfather, M.O. Ghani was one of the first Bengali-Indian Muslims to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry from the United Kingdom. He went on to become founder-vice chancellor of Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh, vice chancellor of the University of Dhaka, Pakistan's Ambassador to Tanzania and other East African countries, and an independent Member of Parliament in Bangladesh. [13]
In 1998, Ahmad conceived and co-directed the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education & Society. [14]
In September 2006, the Parliament of Bangladesh ratified the landmark Charter of the Asian University for Women. The Charter endowed the university with institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and embedded it in the principle of non-discrimination. In 2005 and 2006, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided the start-up funds which enabled AUW to become operational in 2008. [15]
AUW is chartered by the Parliament of Bangladesh as an independent international university. To date, over $100 million in private philanthropic support has been contributed to this initiative. In addition, the Government of Bangladesh has granted 140 acres of land for a purpose-designed campus. [16]
Ahmad is a recipient of a number of awards including the United Nations Gold Peace Medal & Citation Scroll, given by the Paul G. Hoffman Awards Fund for "outstanding contribution to national and international development." [8] In 2002, Ahmad was elected as a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum. Ahmad was also given the John Phillips Award from Phillips Exeter Academy, his alma mater. The award is given to "an alumnus or alumna of the academy, still living at the time of nomination, whose life demonstrates John Phillips' ideal of goodness and knowledge united in noble character and usefulness to mankind. [17] It is the highest honor accorded by the academy to an alumnus.
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