Mr. Rahman featured in DealMaker Middle East (issue Feb/Mar 2009).
View the article "They are the Future" here: dealmaker_oneummah.pdf.
They are the future
The ex-Merrill man who is now committed to educating the most vulnerable in society – the world’s poverty-stricken children
On 23 March 1999 Mustafa Saeed Rahman was travelling to a friend’s house in Portland, Oregon. Out of the blue, a drunk driver skidded around a bend in front of the car in which Mustafa was travelling. He died in the collision – it was six days before his 12th birthday.
His father, Mohammad, created the One Ummah Foundation in memory of his son and what started as a small charity for friends and family, has now mushroomed into an organization that funds projects in Cambodia, Cameroon, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Mohammad and his wife Tasneem hope that by the end of 2009 the foundation will reach out to even more of the world’s most disadvantaged children; children who are born into crushing poverty, and live a bleak existence, with even bleaker prospects. Rahman says, “I wanted to keep Mustafa’s memory alive as long as I possibly could, and the best way of doing this was creating a Foundation. Our key focus was to break the cycle of child labor.”
Rahman has over 25 years of financial services expertise under his belt. He was senior vice president and portfolio manager for Wachovia and vice president for private clients for Merrill Lynch. Today he runs Rubicon Global Asset Management, an investment banking firm from Portland, Oregon.
He is a committed Muslim, originally from Pakistan, but stresses that the Foundation is wholly secular and established just to help the poorest of the poor regardless of color or creed. “We have built a school in Cambodia for Buddhist children with my partner, former Newsweek journalist, Bernie Krisher. One Ummah means ‘One People’ and we are all God’s people, regardless of where we are born, or what book we follow. We will help any child in need.”
The foundation is staffed by volunteer philanthropists, and 100 percent of donations go to those in need. Through partnerships with
other organizations, One Ummah has helped build more than 200 schools. The Foundation’s goal is to end the cycle of illiteracy and poverty through education, focusing on improving educational infrastructure, including constructing new schools, refurbishing existing schools and providing needed materials for both new and existing schools. The Foundation has even ‘adopted’ an island called Phumtrea in Cambodia following the Asian Tsunami in 2004.
“We only focus below poverty level, otherwise these children would be in child labor,” says Rahman. “The need is so great and education is the best gift we can give children in another country.”
The next stage of the development of One Ummah will utilize the quarter century’s worth of experience Rahman has gleaned from Wall Street as it ventures into microfinance. The initiative will target the children’s parents. The reasoning is that if One Ummah can provide the basic necessities for them to run their own businesses, they will be less likely to make their children work and more likely to send them to school.
The Grameen model, using group lending at low interest rates, provides a successful, debt-based model for microfinance. While One Ummah recognizes the contribution of Grameen’s microfinance model, it will also encourage alternative structures of microfinance including those which take equity- rather than debt-based approaches, which is compliant with Islamic values.
The Foundation has already trialed the model in Cambodia, where it has rescued children and young women trafficked into the country’s notorious sex industry. For as little as $200 it can buy a girl from a brothel and set her up with her own business, so that she can support her family without being forced into the vice trade.
