Community Jameel

Watch the trailer to Ankur, our award-winning short documentary film about women in West Bengal banding together to rebuild their lives after devastating tropical cyclones. Ankur has been officially selected to be screened in Riyadh at the UN COP16 desertification conference, at 6pm on 3 December 2024, at the G20 Global Land Initiative Restoration Pavilion in the Blue Zone. The screening marks the film's premiere and official release.  Ankur – which means seedling in Bengali – tells the story of an eponymous project to empower women-led collectives in the Sundarbans to restore their homes, build new shelters and restore their farmland and their livelihoods, using a combination of traditional farming practices and novel techniques. Supporting over 10,000 women farmers in the Sundarbans, the Ankur project has reduced food insecurity by over 96% for more than 42,000 people, and curtailed their dependency on chemical pesticides and fertilisers by 90%. The project is a collaboration between Community Jameel and the Rupantaran Foundation, the two organisations that co-produced the film. Ankur is directed by Nathaniel Daudrich and produced by Smita Sen and George Richards. The film has won prizes at the Sundarbans International Film Festival and Durgapur International Film Festival, and was officially selected for the West Bengal Short Film Festival, the Kolkata Shorts International Festival and the Kolkata International Micro Film Festival.

The Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and Community Jameel have launched a new strategic partnership to tackle pressing global challenges, including poverty, disease, hunger and the impacts of climate change. Launched by HE Dr Muhammad Al Jasser, IsDB group chairman, and Mohammed Jameel KBE, founder and chairman of Community Jameel, the partnership focuses on 2 billion people living in IsDB member countries. Through the partnership, IsDB aims to work with research centres supported by Community Jameel, including: - The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to advance evidence-based policymaking to alleviate poverty, - The Jameel Institute at Imperial College London, harnessing data to strengthen public health system, - The MIT Jameel Clinic, deploying AI tools for healthcare, and - The Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action, using data to anticipate and adapt to climate change, particularly in the field of food security.

Around 1 in 10,000 children has gone on to develop a rare, severe inflammatory condition weeks after contracting COVID-19, with symptoms including rash, swelling, nausea and vomiting. New research, funded by the Community Jameel Imperial College COVID-19 Excellence Fund, has identified how rare variants of a gene regulating the gut lining may increase – by up to 4 times – the risk of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Researchers at Imperial College London, including Evangelos Bellos and Vanessa Sancho Shimizu, worked with colleagues at The Francis Crick Institute, including Adrian Hayday, and others to sequence the genomes of MIS-C patients and identify the relevant gene variants. They are now studying the mechanisms by which these rare variants promote MIS-C. The Community Jameel Imperial College COVID-19 Excellence Fund was launched in 2020 to catapult research by scientists on the frontlines of the pandemic. https://lnkd.in/dh8bJvPN

Lord Ara Darzi, chairman of our advisory committee, and George Richards, our director, participated in the 4th high-level ministerial conference on antimicrobial resistance, hosted last week in Jeddah by the Ministry of Health Saudi Arabia. Lord Darzi, who also chairs the Fleming Initiative, joined a plenary panel on access and affordability, while George met with Dr Hans Kluge, director of the WHO Regional Office for Europe, to discuss the Jameel Arts & Health Lab and more, and spoke alongside Dr Hanan Balkhy, director of the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO), at a meeting on last-mile logistics for AMR, where he discussed the Jameel Institute–Rapid Intelligent Support for Emergencies.

The Ejada programme in Jordan – which supports teachers' wellbeing to enable them to deliver impactful education in classrooms where students have experienced the trauma of displacement – is set to be scaled up by the Ministry of Education and could reach 1.4 million students, educators and caregivers nationwide. Over a five-year pilot, Ejada has reached over 283,000 people, significantly improving the academic performance of tens of thousands of children in participating schools by supporting teachers' mental health and wellbeing, according to two impact studies. Ejada is a collaboration between Save the Children UK / Save The Children Jordan and the MIT Jameel World Education Lab, supported by the Ministry of Education - Jordan, Community Jameel, Dubai Cares and Alwaleed Philanthropies. Ejada was conceived in January 2019 at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, at a high-level session on refugee education attended by HM Queen Rania Al Abdullah and co-hosted by Hassan Jameel, vice chairman of Community Jameel, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, then-chief executive officer of Save the Children International and a former prime minister of Denmark. In October 2019, the programme was launched following a refugee education summit in Amman attended by HM Queen Rania Al Abdullah and Hassan Jameel, and convened by the Queen Rania Foundation with Save the Chdilren and the MIT Jameel World Education Lab.

Find out more about JI-RISE, the new initiative from the Jameel Institute at Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that, starting in Gaza and Sudan, will deliver critical data – including on traumatic injuries, malnutrition, mortality and vaccination planning – to humanitarian organisations and policymakers amid crises to help them effectively prioritise the aid response. Supported by Community Jameel, JI-RISE is collaborating with a consortium of humanitarian organisations and research institutions, including the World Health Organization, the United Nations OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Geneva Water Hub, a Centre of Competence on Water for Peace. JI-RISE expands on work previously funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to model future mortality rates in Gaza. https://lnkd.in/euXS6xYY

Starting in Gaza and Sudan, the Jameel Institute–Realtime Intelligent Support for Emergencies uses the power of data modelling to cut through the fog of war and give humanitarians a clearer picture of what is needed, by whom, when and where – thereby helping deliver aid more effectively and saving lives. Led by (and with thanks to) OJ Watson, Bhargavi Rao and colleagues at the Jameel Institute at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, U. of London, JI-RISE is supported by Community Jameel. To transform the humanitarian response for people injured, malnourished and at risk of disease in conflict zones, JI-RISE will deliver data on traumatic injuries, malnutrition, mortality and vaccination planning to a consortium of partners, including the World Health Organization, UN OCHA Centre for Humanitarian Data, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Geneva Water Hub, a Centre of Competence on Water for Peace. Thanks also to Mark Bryson-Richardson, who co-chaired the meeting with me in February on harnessing British science for the Gaza emergency, at which the idea for JI-RISE first emerged, and other FCDO colleagues – including Charlotte Watts and Chris Lewis – for funding work to model future mortality rates in Gaza on which JI-RISE expands. https://lnkd.in/dhWXGMK7

Pratham-Jameel Second Chance enables 10,000 girls and young women in India who have dropped out of school to complete their secondary education each year. In its first year, the programme helped 11,399 girls and women re-engage with formal education, with thousands passing their grade 10 exams. The partnership between Community Jameel and the Pratham Education Foundation extends the work of the Second Chance programme, which has reached 40,000 learners across 12 states in India since 2011.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) affiliates Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson, and their collaborator Simon Johnson. The prize was awarded in recognition of their work on the relationship between political systems and economic growth. Daron and James bring the number of Nobel laureates in the J-PAL network to 5, joining J-PAL co-founders Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and longtime affiliate Michael Kremer, who shared the prize in 2019. Daron is pictured (second from right) together with J-PAL global executive director Iqbal Dhaliwal (right) and Pratham Education Foundation CEO Rukmini Banerji (third from right) and other colleagues at the J-PAL headquarters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They are standing in front of an embroidered quilt by Fumiko Nakayama entitled ‘People of the world’. Hand-stitched using the traditional mola appliqué technique of the Guna people from Panamá, the quilt is a gift from Community Jameel.

Yesterday, we and The King’s Foundation announced the new Jameel House of World Traditional Arts in Scotland, a school for students of traditional arts worldwide, and a new Jameel House Scholarship for students from the Arab world at the network of Jameel Houses in Cairo, Jeddah and Scotland and at The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London. To mark the announcement, our founder and chairman, Mohammed Jameel KBE, presented His Majesty The King, royal founding president of The King’s Foundation, with an embroidered quilt by Fumiko Nakayama during a visit to Dumfries House, the headquarters of The King’s Foundation, which will host the new school. Hand-stitched using the traditional mola appliqué technique of the Guna people from Panamá, the quilt will be hung in the Jameel House in Scotland. Left to right: The King’s Foundation’s executive director, development, Colin Mackenzie-Blackman, and CEO, Kristina Murrin CBE, and Community Jameel’s founder and chairman, Mohammed Jameel KBE, vice chairman, Hassan Jameel, and director, George Richards.