The floating hospital of Friendship has become an icon of innovative development and healthcare. But that is just a tip of the iceberg. As Friendship commemorates its 20th anniversary this year, there is so much to look back on, so many achievements on the remote chars of Bangladesh, so many challenges and so many stories to tell. Runa Khan, founder and executive director of Friendship, in an interview with Prothom Alo, tells all.
There is a passion that lights up her eyes, a determination that rings in her words and controlled energy in her every gesture. Whether she is speaking of the people eking out a living from less than the bare necessities, or her experience with the global leaders at COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh, or the floating hospital that takes healthcare to communities of the forgotten far flung chars, there is a dogged determination about her. This is a woman with a purpose.
This is Runa Khan, founder and executive director of Friendship, the development organisation that has made waves with its floating hospital and several other interventions for the struggling people, particularly in hard-to-reach areas of the country.
She likes to describe Friendship as an SPO, a social purpose organisation, rather than the commonly used label 'NGO'. She explains, “The term ‘non-government’ immediately has an exclusion. And I am not an exclusion. I am part of this country. Everything that Friendship does is with the government and with everybody together making a difference in this country. We are a social purpose organisation.”
How did it all begin?
Runa Khan is quite frank, “In my childhood, we grew up in a sort of bubble, quite privileged. Poverty meant slums and beggars, not more than that. You start getting used to it. You see beggars on the streets, but that becomes part of your ecosystem and you tend to overlook. But I didn’t always do that. There were many incidents in my life where I felt pain. I remember really rethinking about differences.”
"I felt that I could do something for this country. It was not in an ambitious way, but it was just that I felt that perhaps I would be able to do something because I really had no greed for money or power, the things that prevents you from going to the core of a problem."
Life had its ups and downs for Runa, but her eye was set on the goal of making a difference. Then she met intrepid Yves Marre, the French man who had sailed a river barge all the way from France to Bangladesh. He was an adventurer, doing things which nobody else had done, even breaking world records. They tied the knot, but Runa made one thing clear, “The first thing I told him is that even if I marry you, I am not going to leave the country. I want my children’s schooling to be done in Bangladesh so that they feel that this is their country. That was extremely important. I felt I could contribute something, though how or what, I still didn’t know.”
He had sailed this river barge to Bangladesh and he was supposed to give this to the Rotary Club and go off. But there was a hitch in fund procurement. Runa saw this as an opportunity. “I asked if I could take over the ship and do something with it. Rotary Club said yes. So I made an organisation.”
“I had no experience of these things, I didn’t even know what an NGO was, I had never been on a ship, I had never been in a hospital aside from private clinics and such. But here I was ready to take the risk of taking healthcare to areas where people didn’t have any healthcare. Nobody believed that I could do it.”
It was then that Runa Khan approached the head of Unilever South Asia, Jeff Fraser with the idea of a floating hospital to reach people in remote areas of Bangladesh. He had trust in her and said, “You are going to do it.” Sanjeev Mehta, who was the head of Unilever at that time, also trusted her implicitly and they drew a very simple one-page agreement to run the hospital, to reconstruct and renovate it from a ship to a hospital.
Runa has more interesting tales to tell. “My father’s friend was very close to Mother Teresa. Just before she died, she said, Oh, you’ve got a ship for the poor! I will go and bless it. So in 1974, Mother Teresa came. We just put up some shamianas and we gave healthcare in Narayanganj at the Bengal Glass factory. We had patients coming in and we kind of did the inauguration of the floating hospital. Besides being a saint, Mother Teresa was a very clever woman. She said, ‘Now that I have come, you will get money!’”
It wasn’t smooth sailing though. “Yves and I built these boats,” recalls Runa, “and we used to sail around Bangladesh. I use to see areas on Jamuna River and I couldn't believe people were actually living in these areas. How were they managing life stuck on those islands? What is the opportunity that they had in their life? What would happen to the children? There was not even a shop on these islands, no electricity, no doctor. I said this is the place to come because there was just no opportunity here. I decided to take up our work there.”
“I started using a lot of pro bono help for people. Companies gave us money, friends gave us money to maintain the ship until it could be converted. Unilever finally gave the budget and then we had the ship converted and taken to these islands. Of course in the meanwhile, I had to make an NGO. I realised it was extremely difficult to work with international NGOs (INGOs) and big organisations. Everybody came in with a certain mandate and way of doing things. Sometimes NGOs would come with relief programmes in one or two islands and then be gone. But I knew it wouldn’t work. You needed everything there in an atypical way.”
“There is no innovation in healthcare,” Runa says, “There is no innovation in education. So I started on the system innovation. International NGOs all have different mandates – they will do only education, or only primary health care, or only awareness, or only issues of women and children. That will not work. You can’t leave half the population and give service to half. You can’t leave the children and only take care of the mothers. If an old man is sick, you have to take him to hospital. I said I am going to do what is right and then I am going to see where I get the money from. I tried hard.”
She continues, “I remember we had 700 cataract patients. There were children. Children get a lot of congenital cataract in these areas. There were old men. There were a lot of young men who were income earners. All of them were cataract blind. I went to an international organisation that deals with eye operations. They told me that they needed to do a baseline survey. I said we have the patients, we have the hospital, we have everything, we just need money for a doctor to do the operations. The baseline survey was going to cost half our budget. I could give them the list. Our eye technician has passed out from Aurobindo in India. He could detect cataracts. And the doctor would check too. But they said no. I said this is not going to work. I decided that the donors needed to see where the real needs are. The operating modality has to be set by us to make it real.”
Direct funding is not by only giving the money. It is a question of respect and partnership
“We were the first in the world to start in the South and then go ahead and start an international organisation in Luxembourg. I made Friendship international as an independent organisation. This is the North-South dichotomy which was presented in 2016 in the Humanitarian Summit in Turkey and it was from there that term ‘localisation of funding’ came in.”
“Now Routledge and Kegan Paul have brought out this book on North South Dichotomy in which our modality has been presented. In front of President Macron I actually said that today you need to change the name of ‘localisation of funding’. If you don’t do so, then international organisations get into a panic, thinking all the money is being given directly to the South. There are gaps of understanding. Direct funding is not by only giving the money. It is a question of respect and partnership.”
Once Sir Fazle Hasan Abed suggested that Runa should make Friendship international, but that was not her way of seeing things. She elaborates, “The reason I believe Friendship should not go to Sierra Leone or Africa or Australia, is because I do not believe in this model. It is an old model, a kind of colonising model. In those days perhaps there were no people who could do the implementation of projects in those countries. Today look at the entrepreneurs we have in Bangladesh, in South Africa, in Kenya, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia. It is fabulous. They can all run their own projects. You don’t have to go and implement things for them. You can be partners to them.”
Going more into the details of Friendship’s work, including the ethical product outlet, Colours of Chars, Runa elaborates how they have dealt with the challenges and come up with solutions tailored to the needs.
“The remote chars where we went had women who could not read and write. We set up adult education. Then the women said, okay, now how do we earn money? So we started crafts in the chars -- saris, fabrics. Then the fabrics started gathering. We needed to sell these. But I felt it is not fair that we get donor money and use it for commercial sales because there are other people in this country who have borrowed bank money and are doing the same thing. And we can't buy dye because we can't throw it into the river. We are always going to make a loss because production is always hampered. If there is a storm, nobody can come. Or a woman will say, I am going to feed my baby now, or cook or work in the field, and she's gone. So we knew it would never be a very commercially viable enterprise. But still, it is in the market. When we need the money, we tell the donor this is going to be used for for training 25 to 30 women who will not work with us. We train them so they can have their own enterprises. We have sewing classes every month out of which maybe two stay with us. The rest are going off and maybe doing their own businesses. We allow them to keep using the sewing machines and keep practicing. When they are good, only then we give them the loan.”
There is a uncommon combination of non-compromising ethics and pragmatism in Runa’s words as she continues to share her experiences. “There is a moral dilemma which is a part of our decision making process and is why we call it a social purpose organisation. To get a licence to work with IDCOL, we needed to have a certain amount of solar home systems. IDCOL's partners are BRAC, Grameen, everything big. I told IDCOL, we will only do a few thousand, but it will go where nobody else can go. We met all the criteria of IDCOL and got the licence."
"We found out how much a person was using for kerosene lamps. I said we will not take more than that from them. As it grew, we noticed there was something very wrong because if I am going to ask RahimAfrooz to come and fix the batteries, it take three days and then they won't have electricity for three days. We started para solar-technicians, the first ones in the country. Now we have thousands of para solar technicians, two or three in each village. They have a technical hub and they can repair everything in the village. They are earning anything between 12,000 to 35,000 taka a month.”
The other problem was, with so many solars, where are they throwing the battery when it doesn't work anymore? They are throwing it into the river! Can you imagine, millions of these batteries going into the river. So in the chars we started the first solar villages. The batteries are all managed by us so that we can take the batteries when they are not working and bring it to the recycling centre. From there, innovation has come. You see farmers now with fans of their heads with a solar panel, spraying the fields. They are cool! There are so many innovations and they are making these for others. People asked, why are you not patenting these? I said, this should not be patented. We are a social purpose organisation for this country.”
It has been a long trek in development. Runa recalls “When I started Friendship, I had gone to that char first where there were 18 families who had not eaten for two days. Once I was sitting there with Khaled Shams and my father and my team and they asked, can you put up a school here with adult education? I said, I do not have the money for it. They said, we will lend you one lac taka. And today we have a student who attended our school and is now in the university, AUW. So that village came from there to here.”
Climate change and the chars
“I realise these chars were where one of the first impacts of climate change was coming in,” says Runa, “We first started schools from 2006. Our schools are all mobile and can be dismantled. From 2006 to 2012, we would shift one school maybe every one or two or three years. But from 2012 to 2018, nearly every year we had to move one school. Last year we dismantled six schools in just one year. It is very simple data. Agricultural land, breakage of land, movement of people, all had accelerated. Every time you move, you get poorer. This is the reality. We have done adaptation solutions. These are adaptation solutions of health, education, the basic needs of people when they are migrating. Here we have solutions for the climate migrants.”
Given that Runa and her organisation work in the chars, perhaps among the most vulnerable to climate change, it seems only right that she attended the recent UN Climate Change Conference of COP 27 held at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Talking about her experience, she says, “We started going from COP 21. We started the first adaptation solutions for the COP. We had applied to UNFCCC registration, Covid came, the registration didn’t come through, then finally it came through. Even before registration, we had more than 27 programmes at COP 27. This year we had around 23 or more programmes at the COP.”
Who has come to visit Bangladesh and to find out about the pains and sufferings that is happening? How many from among the negotiators?
“There are two or three COPs going on simultaneously. There is the negotiation COP. There is the blue zone-green zone COP. The innovation COP. And the demonstration COPs. Each area fundamentally is screaming for their own things in that isolated box. Scientists, poor things, are in between running around, trying to tell everybody, look, we are in real danger. We have to do something! Then people come out and say, cool it, take it easy, we need to work comfortably together. But have they forgotten about timing? Somebody said it was like Davos. I said, excuse me, it’s not Davos. Davos is economic. Davos can wait 20 years. Climate change is today. The negotiators should first visit all the blue zones and green zones, mix with the scientists, see the fear in the people, see the impact on the communities. The politicians have to know the reality.”
“The number of people to be impacted is biggest in Bangladesh. Who has come to visit Bangladesh and to find out about the pains and sufferings that is happening? How many from among the negotiators? We had politicians at the negotiating table, but this is not the reality. Reality is the girl who is there. The negotiators have to be faced by them to understand what is happening. Do we have time? There is the time factor that only scientists and activists are screaming about. And the people are suffering. There needs to be a real change in the modality of COP.”
“I was speaking at the Club of Rome and someone asked, what are the two or three things that you would want for the COP? I said, one, the negotiation COP should only be after the negotiators visit the innovation COP and the blue zone-green zone. Number two, ask the negotiators what are the five most important things for humanity and the planet. Will any of them say adaptation solutions, migrants, or how to keep the birds alive? They say, we have forestation as compensation. What does that even mean? Don’t the plants have a right on this planet? You are only looking at this as compensation – this is not the right way of looking at things. It is reactive. Why can we not have proactive things? COP is becoming an economic forum. Companies are sponsoring it. If you take sponsorship from a company, how are you going to act against it? This must change.”
‘Change’ has become a key word in politics of late. Has Runa Khan thought about going into politics?
She bursts out in laughter. “I want real changes to happen. I want to do it in the way where I have my strengths. My strength is not politics. Very bluntly, I don’t like politics. It involves something that is not basically me and what is not basically me, I will never be able to do with verity and truth. So I do not want to enter into politics ever.”
Has she ever thought of writing a book?
“Yes, I have actually. I have thought of simultaneously writing three books. That is where the problem is. And another problem is I am running a fairly large organisation in a country which has changes in its legal formats and regulations every day. So it is a constant challenge and I am so caught up in day to day activity. I am seriously thinking of taking a holiday for three or four months and writing.”
“I want to do three books. One, because I am so often asked about my life, who I am, who are you, Runa? I think I am a mixture of the old and the new. I have grown up with a hundred servants in Korotia, in Delduar, in Bogra. Then I have also grown up seeing the world change, having a lot of internal pain with family. All this has moulded me into the person I am. My father played a very big role. My grandmother played a very big role. To a certain extent, there was a simplicity and grace in my mother which also played a role. All this together is what I am. So much of my philosophy, my vision, my dos and don’ts, my wants, comes from all that.”
“Then there is the story of Friendship. So much of that story is about how you put ethics, value and philosophy together and work. It is a constant struggle. I never wanted a big organisation. I just wanted a good organisation which benefitted every life it touched. That is my satisfaction.”
“I would also like to do a book on leadership, social innovation and these terminologies, my ideas and philosophy. These three books are something that I have to get out.”