By Kenton X. Chance
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (CMC) — Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley is among three named winners of this year’s international Zayed Award for Human Fraternity on Friday.
Mottley was recognised for her work as a climate change champion and was named alongside the humanitarian organisation, World Central Kitchen, founded by Chef José Andrés, and 15-year-old health innovator Heman Bekele, the award’s first youth honouree, who developed a cost-effective soap to prevent and treat early-stage skin cancer when he was 14.
The annual independent international award recognises “people and entities of all backgrounds, anywhere in the world, who are working selflessly and tirelessly across divides to advance the timeless values of solidarity, integrity, fairness, and optimism and create breakthroughs towards peaceful coexistence”.
The awardees were announced at a news conference here and Mottley, speaking via video, accepted the award, saying that she was honoured but did not expect to receive it.
“We do things every day to make lives easier and to make them sleep easy at night. I therefore never expected this kind of award,” said Mottley, an attorney, who is into her second five-year term as her country’s prime minister.
“I think it’s a validation that we are doing the right thing for the right reasons. This is the only planet we have that can sustain life”.
She said that she repeatedly says, “We have to see people, hear people, and feel people.
“If we do that, we then begin to understand how they become victims, not just to the climate crisis, but continue to be victims to a very unfair and unjust world that has not created a level playing field sufficiently, either for the 193 countries that we have globally, or for the occupants of those countries.”
Mottley said there is still very much “a sense of first-class and second-class citizens.
“And you know that that is unacceptable. It is our common humanity that binds us together. And I hope that we never forget that we continue to have vulnerabilities to climate and biodiversity loss.
“We continue to have vulnerabilities to war and conflict and crime. We continue to have problems with the future and integrity of our soils, which is what, for the most part, provides food for the majority of the human population.”
The Zayed Award for Human Fraternity was launched in 2019 following the historic meeting here between Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayeb, during which they co-signed the Document on Human Fraternity.
The award is named in honour of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), renowned for his humanitarianism and dedication to helping people no matter their background or place in the world.
Mottley paid tribute to Zayed’s vision, saying, he “literally took a country that was fighting to be able to bring development to its people and did not rely on what the prosperity of oil alone brought to him, but decided that development must come outside of the bounty given to them through oil”.
Mottley said that what the UAE has been able to do “is nothing short of miraculous over the last few decades, in terms of bringing development, not just to the people of the United Arab Emirates, but also in bringing the United Arab Emirates to the table to being a major player, in being a force for good in humanity.
“We come to work every day to make it easier for people to sleep at night, and give them less of a burden to carry in life. And if, as a result of that it is recognized, well then I’m humbled by it and it is a privilege. Therefore, I receive such an award,” Mottley said.
The award is adjudicated by its independent jury for their notable contributions to pressing societal issues and nurturing peace and solidarity across diverse communities — both globally and at the grassroots level.
The 2025 judging committee was comprised of Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Dame Patricia Scotland; former President of Senegal, Macky Sall; former Prime Minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero; Director General of the World Trade Organization, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; and Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson.
Fielding questions at the news conference, Scotland said that choosing this year’s honourees was “excruciatingly difficult, which is a good problem to have because so many had brought our attention to people who are doing extraordinary work”.
She said the panel was looking at global problems being confronted by individuals or organisations “who are making a quantifiable difference”.
“But the most important thing we wanted is beacons of hope, because this has become quite a dark world and a dark time, and those who won made us smile, and we were going, ‘Yes! they’re the fight back. They’re the determination.’”
Scotland said the panel hopes that when people look at this year’s honourees, they, too, will celebrate.
“And we hope it will inspire them to do likewise. I hope when they look at what Heman has done, they’ll say, ‘You can never be too young. Young people can lead.’ When they look at the World Kitchen, ‘No problem is too big. You need to eat it, some people say, like an elephant: one bite at a time.’
“And then when you look at the advocacy of Mia Motley, I hope people will say, ‘I’m going to join her, and I’m going to save our world.’
“So, we were looking for inspiration. We were looking for people who had demonstrated their own love of humanity, their own determination to see every other human being as their brother, as their sister.”
She said the panel was looking at outcomes in “people who had made a real difference, and we also wanted to look for those who were themselves inclusive, who had touched people’s lives and had an impact on humanity, not just one part of humanity, but things which touch us all”.
The Commonwealth Secretary-General said that what each of the honourees is doing is generic.
“Prime Minister Mia Motley — climate change is the greatest existential threat that’s facing all of us. No part of the world is not affected by it; that is a global fight, and we need determination”.
Citing the Commonwealth as an example, Scotland said that many small island developing states will not continue to exist if global temperature rise is not contained to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrialisation levels.
“They’ll drown. This is one of the most important fights and affects the whole of humanity,” Scotland said.
She said World Central Kitchen is in every country that has suffered disaster, citing their work in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.
As regards Bekele’s work on fighting skin cancer, Scotland said “Cancer doesn’t care what colour you are, what religion you have, where you live, it will come and it will take you. And I think there’s probably no one in this room who doesn’t know someone who has suffered from cancer, lost someone they love as a result of cancer.”
The three recipients will be honoured on February 4 during the sixth edition of the award ceremony, at the Founder’s Memorial here.
Previous honourees include UN Secretary-General António Guterres, world-renowned cardiac surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, King Abdullah II and Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, as well as grassroots activists Shamsa Abubakar Fadhil of Kenya and Sister Nelly Leon Correa of Chile, and honorary recipients Pope Francis and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayeb.