WRI congratulates its Indian partners Dr. Marcella D’Souza and Crispino Lobo each for recently receiving the Karmaveer Puraskaar (Award) from the Indian Confederation of NGOs and the Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation.
The citations for the awards read as follows:
Dr. Marcella D’Souza has been serving the people from the mountains of Peru to the arid plains of India. In the South Andes she organized a large-scale community-led, indigenous knowledge-based health care system. In Maharashtra, Marcella was responsible for developing a pedagogy for empowering women through self-help, group formation and federation at the village level, as well as mainstreaming women into the decision making structures of the village. 55,000 women from 1100 villages have directly benefited from these efforts. Over 65,000 women benefit from access to financial and technical resources through the Sampada Trust, a micro-finance institution founded by her. Through this award, ICONGO, the Indian Confederation of NGOs, recognizes Noble Laureate Marcella D’Souza for developing a pedagogy for the empowerment of women, and creating the means for women to be creators of community wealth.
Crispino Lobo organized the large-scale and highly successful watershed development initiative in Maharashtra called the Indo-German Watershed Development Program (IGWDP) in 1989 and co-founded the Watershed Organisation Trust [WOTR] in 1993. In 1999 he co-initiated the setting up of the National Watershed Development Fund to take the experiences of the IGWDP and WOTR across 100 districts in the country. He has been instrumental in supporting and building up capacities of 403 NGOs across the country as well as directly touching the lives of over 5,90,000 people. Crispino’s outstanding contribution has been to translate vision and passion into scalable accountability-based outcome-oriented systems and processes. Through this award, ICONGO, the Indian Confederation of NGOs, recognizes Noble Laureate Crispino for pioneering work in empowerment of the grassroots.
The award-winning work on watershed restoration in India was featured in World Resources 2005 (click here for an audio slideshow featuring WOTR’s work [select the upper-right image]). The work of the Watershed Organization Trust will also be featured in World Resources 2007, due out later this year.
The March 10 award ceremony will be broadcast on television on the NDTV Profit channel on April 15 from 4.30 - 5.30 pm.
