The Kramers theory of activated processes is generalized for nonequilibrium open one-dimensional systems. We consider both the internal noise due to thermal bath and the external noise which are stationary, Gaussian and are characterized by arbitrary decaying correlation functions. We stress the role of a nonequilibrium stationary state distribution for this open system which is reminiscent of an equilibrium Boltzmann distribution in calculation of rate. The generalized rate expression we derive here reduces to the specific limiting cases pertaining to the closed and open systems for thermal and nonthermal steady state activation processes.