Bangladesh's Runa Khan wins 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Award

What happened?

Runa Khan, founder of the Bangladeshi organisation Friendship, is one of three recipients of the 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Award. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation announced the awardees on 31 August 2026.

The foundation’s board recognised Khan’s “profound empathy for the poorest of the poor in her country”. It also praised her courage, vision and persistence in building and leading Friendship.

The award will be presented on 15 November 2026 at the Metropolitan Theater in Manila.

How did Friendship begin?

Khan was born in 1958 and started her career as a teacher of young children in 1979. In 1997 she visited a char, a sandbar island, on the Brahmaputra River. In 2002 she opened a hospital ship for people living on chars. In the same year she founded the organisation that became Friendship.

What does it do now?

According to the foundation, Friendship now runs:

• seven hospital ships and two land-based hospitals
• 550 mobile clinics
• a network of 700 trained community medic aides

It also works beyond health care:

• Schools that move. Friendship builds prefabricated schools that can be taken apart and rebuilt elsewhere. Almost 30,000 students have been reached.
• Jobs. More than 205,000 people have found new work through 137 local economic development hubs.
• Climate resilience. It built the first solar villages, planted more than 200 hectares of mangroves and trained more than 10,000 volunteers in rescue and relief.

Friendship employs more than 7,500 people, most of them from the communities it serves. It works with river, coastal and refugee communities, including Rohingya people displaced from Myanmar.

Why does it matter?

Bringing services by boat reaches people that roads and fixed clinics cannot. A foundation trustee said the aim was to make sure “distance never takes away their dignity”.

People in Britain were honoured this year for similar local work. See the 2026 Pride of Britain winners and finalists.