Runa Khan on privilege and responsibility—‘It’s not rocket science’

Khan did not come from aid. Born in 1958 into a Bengali family descended from the zamindars of Bengal, she opened a boutique in 1988 to give work to Bihari and indigenous artisans, joined the family printing business and co-founded a company running cruises on restored wooden boats. She became an Ashoka Fellow in 1994 and won a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2006 for her work preserving Bangladesh’s boat-building heritage. 

Friendship began as a river barge converted into a floating hospital, serving the chars, the shifting islands of silt that flood and erode with the seasons. “I started the work because I just couldn’t leave or not be responsible for what was staring at me in the face, which was incredible poverty,” she shares. It has since become a three-tier health system of seven hospital ships, two land-based hospitals, 550 mobile clinics and 700 trained community medic aides, with a team of 7,000. It says it serves more than 7.5 million people every year, roughly 20 per cent of the health services and treatments delivered in Bangladesh. In November 2025, it won The Earthshot Prize in the “Fix Our Climate” category, the first Bangladeshi organisation to do so. The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation cites Khan’s “profound empathy for the poorest of the poor” and the “courage, vision and tenacity” with which she built and led it.

Healthcare came first, she explains, because a person with a wound wants the wound fixed before anything else. Then came storms, then income, then schools. She dismisses any suggestion of grand strategy. “I have not been reading books on development. It all came from the needs of the community. I listened to what people said, and I listened to what they did not say, because if they don’t say it, there is the pain,” she says.

Climate runs through all of it. Friendship’s movable schools float, and they have had to keep moving as the rivers swelled and the current quickened to around 14 knots. “In 2018, 16 schools had to be moved in one year. I don’t even need a rocket scientist to come and evaluate what the problem is. I can feel it daily.” Friendship now says it is the country’s largest mangrove reforestation organisation, and it has built oval flood shelters that face the river’s flow. Only a handful have broken over the years.

See also: Why the global fight for justice is not only for the elected few, according to Ramon Magsaysay 2026 awardee Bo Kyi

Khan talks about people rather than totals. A widow trained in vermicomposting now earns about one lakh taka a month, and Khan’s next task is teaching her how to use it. Friendship tracks its schoolchildren long after they leave, and says it filled in 140 university application forms this year. “You create a platform and not quicksand for them to stand upon.”

She is equally unsentimental about funding. Donors whose values diverged from hers were turned away. “I didn’t even want to know whether they were giving me US$10 or US$2 million. If they were giving me a path which could not work, I didn’t take it.” Nor does she soften what the early years demanded, when people doubted a woman could do the work. “I have stood in mud up to my knees in the middle of the night, seeing boats come down, fixing problems. I just pulled out my saree and just stood there till it was done.” The sari she wore for the press briefing, she added, was made by the communities Friendship supports.

Asked what privilege should look like, she offered a three-part rule for money: give some away, even if only one per cent; save some, because it gives courage to hope for tomorrow; and use some. “Money is only a tool. It’s only as much as you can do without,” she says.

Her next step is the Friendship Academy, to share what the organisation has learned, and she was firm on how. “I don’t want to go to other countries and replicate it. I think that’s a very old-fashioned, colonialistic way of doing it. You are the person who will say what you need for your country and your people. This is, for me, respect.”

Also asked what the privileged and the poorest of the poor share, her answer was the simplest she gave all hour. “Blood is red,” Khan said. The similarity, she added, is easy to see and hard to feel without empathy.

Then she turned to the people with the power to act. “I would appeal to all the rich people and all the politicians in the world,” she said. “When you tell them to go and fight, think that this could be your child you’re sending out. When you see an old woman who has nowhere to go, it could be your mother.”

She paused on what she was asking for. “This empathy is all that I can ask for.”

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