Sabriye Tenberken

Sabriye Tenberken was born in Germany in 1970 and lost her sight completely by the age of twelve due to a degenerative eye condition. Rather than accept the limited horizons often assumed for blind children at the time, she pursued university study, choosing the highly unusual combination of Tibetology, sociology and philosophy, and travelling to Tibet as a student despite advisers who doubted a blind woman could manage independent travel in such remote terrain.

While studying she developed a script adapting braille to the Tibetan language, which did not previously exist, working out the system through painstaking trial and error since almost none of the specialist help available for other languages existed for Tibetan. In 1998 she co-founded Braille Without Borders, opening a school in Lhasa for blind Tibetan children, many of whom had previously been hidden away by families ashamed of a disability that carried heavy stigma, and who arrived at the school with no education at all.

The school taught not only literacy but practical skills intended to let graduates support themselves, including farming and small trades, reflecting Tenberken's insistence that blind students needed genuine independence, not charity. In 2007 she and a colleague founded kanthari, a training centre in Kerala, India, that prepares people with disabilities and people from difficult backgrounds worldwide to launch their own social enterprises rather than simply receive aid.

She has argued throughout her career that disability was less limiting than the low expectations placed on disabled people, a case she made through founding institutions rather than only through advocacy.