Barcelona (EFE).- Canadian Sabrina Habib has won the Princess of Girona Foundation Award (FPdGi) in the International category for promoting an affordable early childhood care model in East Africa.
According to the president of the jury, the epidemiologist Pedro Alonso, the choice of Habib responds to the fact that the model he has promoted “also acquires the commitment to work with people at the local level and guarantee quality.”
Habib, whose parents and grandparents were born in East Africa, is CEO and co-founder of Kenya’s largest childcare network, Kidogo, named after a Swahili proverb meaning “all great things start small.”
Its network serves more than 18,000 children
The general director of FPdGi, Salvador Tasqué, has highlighted the “dimension” of the project: “In their centers they care for more than 18,000 children who would be poorly cared for in a phase where the cognitive difference is made so that they can be something in the future” .
Sabrina Habib is aware of the “inherent truth” that where one is born often determines people’s life trajectories and feels that she has won “the genetic lottery simply by being born in Canada” where she had access to a ” quality public education” and an “excellent care system”.
From a very young age, he felt “a responsibility to offer children growing up in poor communities in East Africa an opportunity to break out of their intergenerational cycles of poverty.”
Within the framework of this work, she worked with the Aga Khan Development Network in East Africa, where she was in charge of managing an integrated project of primary health care, as well as social innovations, a job that made her “understand that the childcare crisis taking place in the slums of Nairobi needed to be dealt with differently”.
The birth of Kidogo
And it was then, in 2014, that he launched Kidogo, a “nonprofit scalable social enterprise” that has become the largest childcare network in Kenya.
Kidogo “ensures that young children receive the care, nutrition and stimulation they need to thrive in their early years” while allowing their mothers to “work in peace” by following a “social franchise model” that equips women with the knowledge, skills and support tools to start or grow their own child care micro-enterprises.
The choice of Sabrina Habib completes the proclamations by categories of the winners in the 2023 edition of the FPdGi Awards, present at the announcement of the winner in the International category: the founder of “Palliative Art”, Sílvia Fernández Cadevall (Social) ; the violinist María Dueñas (Art and Letters); the aeronautical engineer Rafael Jordá (Company); and researcher Marc Schneeberger (Scientific Research).
The other winners
Sílvia Fernández (Terrassa, 1992), whose work, motivated in part by wanting to “break the taboo associated with death”, consists of accompanying the emotional dimension of people suffering from an advanced disease through artistic expression, will receive the award for “his perseverance, determination, sensitivity, humility and commitment in accompanying people during illness and at the end of life.”
The violinist María Dueñas, born in Granada in 2002, but who currently lives in Vienna (Austria), was announced the winner for her “extremely high degree of interpretation and execution of the violin” and for her “great talent, discipline and ability to work”. , who constitute an “exceptional inspirational role model for young people”.
Rafael Jordá (Barcelona, 1988), CEO and founder of Open Cosmos, has been selected for “democratizing access to space for the benefit of society, making it possible to launch low-orbit satellites, reducing development and manufacturing times, and at a competitive cost”, in a project that allows “collecting data and measuring” the effects of global challenges such as climate change in order to make “better decisions”.
For his part, the selection of the doctor in Biomedicine and researcher at Yale University Marc Schneeberger (Lloret de Mar, Girona, 1987), who with his work aims to find better therapies for obesity, is due to “his brilliant career and leadership International”, as well as “the impact of his research and his contributions to the discovery of a new region of the brain that is key to energy balance and neurovascular plasticity”.
The Princess of Girona Foundation Awards, which have a financial endowment of 20,000 euros each and respond, according to the president of FPdGi, Francisco Belil, to one of the main objectives of the foundation, “to cover the need for young people to be role models”. They will be delivered to the five winners in an act that the kings normally attend, but whose details have not yet been confirmed.