Runa Khan has spent more than two decades building a life around a simple, stubborn idea: That the people hardest to reach are not people to be left behind. On Monday, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation in Manila named her one of three recipients of the 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Award, widely regarded as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, making her the 14th Bangladeshi to receive it, joining a list that includes Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and BRAC founder Fazle Hasan Abed.
Khan’s path to the award began well before Friendship, the organisation she is best known for founding. She first co-founded Contic, a tourism company running cruises aboard renovated traditional wooden boats, and later, established the Dhaka boutique Mearee to support indigenous artisans and widen the market for ethnic crafts.
In 2002, that experience with boats took an entirely different turn: Khan founded Friendship and, with it, launched a hospital ship to bring healthcare to some of Bangladesh’s most isolated communities: Those living on chars, the shifting sandbar islands of the Jamuna river, cut off for generations from reliable medical care. In a detail Friendship has long treasured, Mother Teresa herself travelled to Bangladesh in the 1990s and blessed the river barge that would later become that first floating hospital.
What began as a single vessel has since grown into an integrated model spanning healthcare, disaster relief, education, climate resilience, capacity building, economic development, and cultural preservation, reaching an estimated 7.5 million people annually across Bangladesh’s north and coastal Bay of Bengal regions.
The Foundation cited Khan specifically for more than two decades of leadership in developing locally led solutions, rather than imported models, built around a deep understanding of the realities facing remote, climate-vulnerable communities. That design philosophy, according to Friendship, has always started from the same premise: That services should be built to reach isolated communities, not built around the assumption that isolated communities will somehow find their way to the services.
Established in memory of former Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay and first awarded in 1958, the prize recognises what the Foundation calls “greatness of spirit” and transformative leadership across Asia. Past recipients have included the Dalai Lama, filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and Mother Teresa herself, making the personal echo of her earlier blessing of Khan’s hospital ship difficult to overlook.
This year’s award goes to Khan alongside Singaporean diplomat, lawyer and academic Tommy Koh and Myanmar human rights defender Bo Kyi, with the formal ceremony set for 15 November at Manila’s Metropolitan Theater.
Accepting the recognition, Khan was quick to redirect credit outward. “There is no leader who walks alone,” she said, describing the honour as “a wonderful responsibility” she owed to the communities Friendship serves and the colleagues who built the organisation’s work alongside her over the past quarter-century.
For a career that started with a single renovated boat and a blessing from a saint-to-be, it is, by Khan’s own framing, less a personal triumph than a shared one: Recognition for a model that, 24 years on, is still fundamentally about showing up where almost no one else does.
