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Concern Worldwide’s assistant country director in Bangladesh, Hasina Rahman, is to receive a top award at UN Headquarters in New York this weekend for her humanitarian work.
Hasina has been named as one of six winners of this year’s ‘People Of Action: Connectors Beyond Borders’ awards for her significant work in helping the vast population of Rohingya refugees, close to Cox’s Bazar in south eastern Bangladesh.
Rotary International will present the award to a half dozen of its members at Rotary Day at the United Nations on Saturday 9 November.
Hasina has been honoured for her work in ensuring nutrition and health services for the Rohingya people, particularly pregnant women and children.
Since joining Concern in 2016, she has been one of the driving forces behind an Outpatient Therapeutic Centre (OTP) that provides vital health services in the camp.
The centre has screened more than 500,000 children since it was set up, helping more than 7,000 severely malnourished children.
“Every bit of my job as a humanitarian is worthwhile,” Hasina says.
“The little changes matter to me. I feel really proud when I go to the field over a period of time and experience, first-hand, the positive changes that are taking place in people's lives because of the work that we are doing.”
Hasina says that “compassion, dedication, commitment, respect, gratitude and accountability” are essential traits for anyone wishing to become a humanitarian, and this award “is a success story for Concern and for Rotary.
“It is an opportunity to raise further awareness for the cause, and build more connections to support the extremely vulnerable people that we work for,” she insists.
Concern has been fighting extreme poverty in Bangladesh since 1972.
More than 1.2m people, including members of the local community and those who fled to Cox’s Bazar before the events in Myanmar’s Rakhine State of August 2017, are in need of humanitarian assistance at the world’s biggest refugee camp.
Others set to pick up awards in New York this weekend are Brazilian Vanderlei Lima Santana for his work with Venezuelan refugees; Ace Robin from Indonesia, for her work in disaster relief; Ilge Karancak-Splane, for her work with Syrian refugee children in Turkey; Lucienne Heyworth for her work in developing an “education in emergencies” curriculum, focused on the Middle East; and Bernd Fischer for his work in the integration of refugee women to German society.
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