Eisenhower Fellowships names Magaly Blas and Shridhar Venkat recipients of the 2025 James and Carol Hovey Eisenhower Fellowships Impact Award

Fellows from Peru and India honored for outstanding project achievement

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Peruvian physician Magaly Blas, Founder and Director of the Mamás del Río (Mothers of the River) program, and Indian former corporate executive Shridhar Venkat, Chief Executive Officer of the Akshaya Patra Foundation, today were named co-recipients of the 2025 Hovey Award for their work to provide maternal health care in the Amazon basin in South America and provide meals to impoverished schoolchildren in India.

Blas and Venkat, Eisenhower Fellows from Peru and India in 2018 and 2014, respectively, were selected for EF's third annual James and Carol Hovey Eisenhower Fellowships Impact Award to recognize an Eisenhower Fellow or group of Fellows for outstanding project achievement in generating positive impact in their society.

Blas' winning project is her work with Mamás del Río, an innovative program she created to improve maternal and child health in remote Amazonian areas, empowering community and traditional birth attendants using mobile technology, safe birth kits and culturally grounded health education.

Since her Eisenhower Fellowship, Blas has expanded the program from Peru across the border to Colombia, reaching more than 100 remote Amazonian communities that belong to ten different indigenous groups and training more than 600 community health workers, traditional midwives and frontline health personnel.

Through her efforts, prenatal care visits have increased from four percent to 63 percent of expectant mothers in the isolated and underserved region, while improving nearly all essential newborn care practices. The program has supported more than 7,000 women with safe childbirth and postnatal services, dramatically improving maternal and neonatal outcomes.

In India, Venkat leads the Akshaya Patra Foundation, the world's largest nongovernmental school lunch and breakfast program. Since its inception in 2000 with the modest goal of serving 1,500 children across five government schools in the Indian state of Bengaluru, Akshaya Patra has grown into a pioneering social impact organization, operating 78 state-of-the-art kitchens that provide more than 2.35 million midday meals and one million morning nutrition servings each day.

Under Venkat's leadership, Akshaya Patra has pioneered innovative, scalable solutions that combine nutrition, education and women's empowerment to feed millions of children each day to schoolchildren across 16 Indian states and three union territories who otherwise would go hungry. His program requires the children to eat their meals in local schools, ensuring their education in impoverished areas of India where those children otherwise would not attend classes.

His program has inspired a similar school lunch program in Kenya, Food for Education, that has collaborated with Akshaya Patra to feed nearly 350,000 children daily, advancing the impact of Venkat's work well beyond his native India.

"Half a world apart, the tireless work of Magaly Blas and Shridhar Venkat has dramatically improved the quality of life for impoverished mothers and their children in their nations," said Eisenhower Fellowships President George de Lama. "By reaching out to provide essential, life-sustaining health care and food in some of the most remote and long-neglected corners of their countries, their inspiring work exemplifies Eisenhower Fellowships' mission to create a world more peaceful, prosperous and just."

Blas and Venkat and their unique nonprofit organizations were selected as this year's co-recipients of the prestigious James and Carol Hovey EF Impact Award in a highly competitive field of 26 project submissions from around the world by a distinguished panel of Eisenhower Fellowships Trustees, Fellows, outside experts and senior staff.

The panel noted that the work of Blas in South America's Amazon River basin and Venkat in the world's most populous democracy has produced wide-ranging impact in both their nations. Citing the impressive growth in the reach of their nonprofits, the panel also recognized that their work has proven to be sustainable. Blas and Venkat will each receive a $10,000 USD prize to support the work of Mamás del Río and Akshaya Patra.

Dr. Magaly Blas is a professor and researcher at the School of Public Health and Administration at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) and leads the political advocacy secretariat in medicine and health at the Peruvian Medical College. A medical doctor, she holds a master's and doctorate in Public Health, specializing in epidemiology, from the University of Washington, where she also completed two diplomas in HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infections and Medical Informatics.

She has received numerous awards, including the international Elsevier Foundation award for women researchers, the L'Oreal-UNESCO-Concytec award for Peruvian scientists, the Women in Innovation award from UPCH, as well as the Eisenhower Fellowship and Fulbright Scholarship. Under her leadership, the Mamás del Río program has been honored by the Pan American Health Organization. In 2023, Forbes magazine named Dr. Blas one of Peru's 50 most influential women.

Prior to joining Akshaya Patra in search of an existential purpose in life, Venkat was Vice President for Sales at Webex Communications. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering and is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program of the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his Eisenhower Fellowship, he is a recipient of the Mother Teresa Social Leadership Scholarship.

EF Trustee Jim Hovey, longtime former vice chairman of the EF Board of Trustees and chairman of its Executive Committee, will present Blas and Venkat the award at the 2025 Hovey Award Dinner and Pin Ceremony for EF's international and American Fellows completing their travels this fall.

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For more information, contact:
Katherine Leventhal, Director, Global Network Programs
[email protected]
215-546-1738

SOURCE Eisenhower Fellowships