High Honors in Pakistan and Ghana Zeba A. Sathar, the Council’s senior program associate and country director for Pakistan, received the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz medal from President Pervez Musharraf on April 11, Pakistan Day. The Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, or Pakistan Medal of Honor, is one of several medals conferred annually by the president. Sathar (pictured below) was honored for dedicated service and selfless devotion to human rights and public service. Her parents and sister attended the investiture, which was held at President House in Islamabad.  | | Photo credit: Government of Pakistan/PID |
A demographer with expertise in the areas of fertility and family planning, Sathar was honored for contributions to Pakistan, including helping to shape national population policy. She was instrumental in forming the Population Association of Pakistan and was elected its first vice president and its second president; she serves on a number of Pakistani government committees. Sathar earned a doctorate in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She spent more than 15 years at the nation’s premier research institution, the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, and has worked for the World Fertility Survey, the World Bank, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is the first Pakistani to be elected to the governing council of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. John Koku Awoonor-Williams, director of the Nkwanta Health Development Centre and valued colleague of the Population Council, was one of 65 doctors who were honored by the World Medical Association as “Caring Physicians of the World.” The honorees are chosen by their peers for “demonstrating humanity and the core values of medicine at its finest.” Awoonor-Williams is also featured on the cover of the 2006 World Health Report, the World Health Organization’s lead publication. This annual report assesses global health with a focus on a specific subject; this year, the report focuses on the current crisis in the global health workforce. A second picture appears inside the report, captioned “Dr. John Awoonor-Williams is the only doctor at Nkwanta District Hospital, Ghana, serving a population of 187,000 in a remote, vast area in the northern part of the Volta Region.” Awoonor-Williams has co-authored dozens of studies and presentations with Council researchers. Senior Council researcher James F. Phillips, who has worked for more than a decade in Ghana, says of him, “Dr. Awoonor-Williams’s success in developing health care in a challenging setting has been an inspiration to his Ghana Health Service colleagues and to those of us at the Council who are privileged to work with him.”(Return to issue contents)
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