About
The lifetime achievement awards were introduced in 2004. So far they have been given largely to Bangladeshis. In the year 2006, the award went to the South African photographer Peter Magubane. The other awards have gone to:

Golam Kasem Daddy
Manzoor Alam Beg
Shamsul Islam Almaji
Amanul Haque
Rashid Talukder

The award does not include anything more than the trophy, but with each award,  a scholarship is given to a needy rural  photographer to study for a year at Pathshala, The South Asian Institute of Photography in Bangladesh.

The Lifetime Achievement Award for Chobi Mela V in 2009 goes to Ricardo Rangel of Maputo, Mozambique. A scholarship to a rural photographer will again be given this year, in the name of Ricardo Rangel.

Known as the doyen of Mozambican photography, Ricardo Rangel, born in 1924 in Maputo is widely regarded as one of Africa’s outstanding photographers in the area of photo reportage, and his socially critical work is in the tradition of the Magnum photographers.

As head of the photographic department and chief photographer ‘Tempo’ the country’s first newsmagazine, he explored and extended the possibilities of photojournalism as a form of active political dissent and recorded the dramatic events that led to the end of Portuguese rule and the birth of independent Mozambique in 1975. In 1977, after the exodus of most of the country's press photographers, he was appointed chief photographer of 'Notícias' and charged with directing and training a new generation of photo-journalists.

Since 1983, Rangel has directed the Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica (CDFF), an educational and documentary centre that is unique in Africa, in Mozambique's capital of Maputo. He has had a seminal influence on the younger generation of photographers through his life and work as a photographer, journalist and teacher.