Butet Manurung

Saur Marlina Manurung, known as Butet, studied anthropology in Indonesia and worked briefly as a journalist and forest guide before taking a job with a conservation group that brought her into contact with the Orang Rimba, a nomadic indigenous people of the Sumatran rainforest whose land and way of life were being steadily eroded by logging and plantation expansion. She found that outsiders, including officials meant to help them, routinely cheated Orang Rimba families in land and timber deals because the community could not read contracts or numbers.

Rather than build a conventional school the Orang Rimba would never attend, Manurung moved into the forest with them, learning their language and customs and teaching literacy and arithmetic informally, on the move, using materials drawn from the community's own surroundings. In 2003 she and colleagues formalised this into the Sokola Institute, which has since extended the same adapted approach to other marginalised and disaster-affected communities across Indonesia, including groups in Papua, Sumba and Flores, tailoring lessons to each community's language and circumstances rather than imposing a single national curriculum.

Her work, chronicled in her own writing and the film Sokola Rimba, has won her the Ramon Magsaysay Award and recognition as a Time "Hero of Asia," alongside continued, largely unglamorous years spent living in remote forest settlements most aid organisations do not reach.