Innovator of the Year Award 2006

At this year's award banquet, we honored Professor Mushtaque Chowdhury of BRAC in Bangladesh and Dr. Jordan Kassalow of Scojo Foundation of New York City as "Innovators of the Year" for their microfranchise partnership that is bringing reading glasses to the Bangladeshi poor. This new microfranchise project has the potential to both help thousands of Bangladeshis and to help us better understand how microfranchising can work with existing microcredit organizations.


In 1999, Kassalow co-founded Scojo Vision LLC, a leading designer and distributor of high-end reading glasses and accessories in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Japan. One year later, he and his partner designated 5 percent of the company's profits to fund Scojo Foundation, a social enterprise that trains entrepreneurs in developing countries to give eye screenings and sell low-cost reading glasses in their communities.

Kassalow is also a practicing optometrist and senior partner at Drs. Farkas, Kassalow, Resnick, PC. Before founding Scojo, he created the Global Health Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, where for five years he served as an adjunct senior fellow. He also served for eight years as the director of onchocerciasis (river blindness) control at Helen Keller International.

Kassalow is a member of the 2005 Class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute. In July 2005, Kassalow was honored by the Draper Richards Foundation and named a Draper Richards Fellow. He serves on the board of Lighthouse International, on the medical advisory board of Helen Keller International, and is a lifetime member at the Council on Foreign Relations. He earned a BA from the University of Vermont, and graduated Beta Sigma Kappa from the New England College of Optometry. From 1990 to 1991, Kassalow spent the academic year on a research fellowship in preventive ophthalmology at John Hopkins School of Medicine and concurrently received his master's of public health at John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

He and his wife, Erica, have three children and live in New York City.

Professor Mushtaque Chowdhury

Dr. A. Mushtaque R. Chowdhury received his education in Dhaka, Bangladesh (BA) and London (MSc, PhD). He joined BRAC, one of the largest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the world, in 1977 and is now its Deputy Executive Director.

He is the founder of BRAC's Research and Evaluation Division (RED), which is one of the most dynamic and large research units in any NGO, with about one hundred staff members. In 2004, RED published several dozen research reports, many of which were in international peer reviewed journals. Chowdhury has extensively published in many journals and books. His professional interests are in poverty alleviation, education, environment, and health. He has worked in many countries of Asia and Africa as consultant and in one such activity he evaluated a large microcredit program in twelve poor provinces of China.

Chowdhury is the founding dean of the newly created James P. Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University, which has attracted students from a dozen countries and four continents. He is also a professor of population and family health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Chowdhury serves on many international committees, including the Task Force on Maternal and Child Health of the UN Millennium Project (co-coordinator), Working Group on Select Diseases of the Joint Learning Initiative on Human Resources for Health (co-coordinator) and the Partnership on Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (Member, Steering Committee). He is also the coordinator of the Education Watch, a civil society initiative in Bangladesh.