Hany Abdel Gawad El-Banna
Co-founder of Islamic Relief
Hany Abdel Gawad El-Banna OBE (born 9 December 1950) is the co-founder of Islamic Relief, an international Muslim relief and development NGO established in 1984 in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Early life and education
Born in Egypt, El-Banna completed his MBBCh Medicine at Al Azhar University, Cairo, where he also obtained a Diploma in Islamic Studies in 1976. El-Banna was awarded the Hamilton Bailey Prize in Medicine at City hospital (previously known as Dudley Road) in 1981, Birmingham UK. He then went on to further his medical training and completed a Doctorate of Medicine (MD) in foetal pathology from the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1991.
Islamic Relief
In 1983, El-Banna attended a medical conference in Sudan during a time of famine in the region. The poverty and desperation he witnessed compelled him to return to the UK and raise funds from family to aid relief efforts.
This led to the foundation of Islamic Relief in January 1984 as an organisation to help people in need. Over the following 24 years, Dr El-Banna visited over 70 countries as part of his role leading Islamic Relief. He permanently left medicine to dedicate all his time to Islamic Relief in 1995.
During his time at the organisation Dr El-Banna worked on raising funds and advocating hundreds of humanitarian causes including for the victims of the genocide in Bosnia, floods and earthquakes in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.
Additionally, Dr El-Banna oversaw the first government funding for a Muslim faith-based organisation and the inclusion of the organisation to the Disasters Emergency Committee, to date the only Muslim organisation to be a member.
The public source identifies “Hany Abdel Gawad El-Banna” as co-founder of Islamic Relief. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hany, Abdel and Gawad.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hany Abdel Gawad El-Banna” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.