Events Planned This Week
Honor 2010 Kravis Prize
Recipient: Pratham

Events this week both in New York and on CMC's campus will honor Pratham, India's largest nonprofit organization focused on education and the 2010 recipient of The Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership.
Pratham will be honored during private dinner ceremonies attended by Prize founders Marie-Jos?e Kravis and Henry R. Kravis '67 in New York on Tuesday, March 23. Accepting the award that evening on behalf of Pratham will be co-founder Farida Lambay, a member of the national-level advisory council on Implementation of the Right to Education Act.
Founded in 1994 with the mission of "Every child in school and learning well," Pratham strives to improve the quality of education for India's most vulnerable children. Read India, Pratham's flagship program, works with governments and communities to improve the reading, writing, and basic arithmetic skills of children ages 6-14.
This catalytic program, which relies on community participation and is initiated by thousands of volunteers, has reached approximately 34 million children to date, resulting in large-scale improvements in literacy levels across several states in India. Pratham also sponsors ASER (Annual Status of Education Report), the largest annual study ever to monitor the status of elementary education in the country. In 2008, the audit reached over 7,04,000 children in 16,198 villages of India. In the four years since it was initiated, the ASER effort has been widely recognized for its innovative use of citizens' participation in understanding and improving the delivery of basic services.
The Kravis Prize, which recognizes extraordinary leadership in the nonprofit sector, was featured in the March 19 article in The New York Times by Paul Sullivan (Philanthropy in the Form of a Fat Cash Prize). The story references last year's McKinsey & Company report indicating that the current direction of philanthropic prizessuch as the Kravis Prizeis trending toward "inducement-style prizes that focus on achieving a specific, future goal."
New York Bureau Chief of The Economist Matthew Bishop and independent writer Michael Green, authors of the 2009 book, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World, also blogged about Pratham's wide-reaching work, and about how the 2010 Kravis Prize benefits the future leadership and vision of India's largest nonprofit, in a post dated Tuesday, March 23. Read it here: http://www.philanthrocapitalism.net/2010/03/kravis-prize/.
In conjunction with this week's New York ceremony, events honoring Pratham continue at CMC on Thursday, March 25 when the Claremont McKenna College President's Leaders Forum Program welcomes program director Dr. Rukmini Banerji to campus. Banerji is the featured speaker during a luncheon at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Although the luncheon is limited to CMC faculty, staff, and students, Banerji's talk at noon, "The Pratham Story: Inspiration, Challenges," is open to the public, with free seating on a first-come basis.
Banerji will later travel to Los Angeles that evening for a 6 p.m. reception at City Club on Bunker Hill, hosted by the Los Angeles Chapter of the Claremont McKenna College Alumni Association.
Initially trained as an economist in India, Rukmini currently is responsible for Pratham's work in several major states in north India. She also is a lead member of the team that conducts the ASER. Rukmini was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She did her postdoctoral work at the Population Research Centre at the University of Chicago and later worked as a program officer at the Spencer Foundation before returning to India in 1996.
For more information about the Kravis Prize, Pratham, and past Kravis Prize recipients, visit: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/kravisprize/.