About the Global Goals List honourees:
One Young World and Vanity Fair today launch the inaugural Global Goals List – honouring those leading the charge to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The Global Goals List, published online and in the March edition of Vanity Fair UK, is created in partnership with One Young World – the global forum for young leaders that identifies, promotes and connects the most impactful young leaders to create a better world, with more responsible, more effective leadership.
The honourees of the inaugural Global Goals List are as follows:
1) Zero Poverty: Professor Muhammad Yunus
Professor Yunus is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader. He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs who do not qualify for tradition bank loans, which have helped many low-income people around the world empower themselves through locally rooted entrepreneurship.
2) Zero Hunger: Brian Bosire
Brian is an innovator, thinker, entrepreneur, and a One Young World Ambassador from Kenya. He is a passionate individual for emerging technologies and applying them to solve the biggest challenges in Africa. Specifically, Brian is most interested in Africa’s most pressing challenges, with specific focus on Agriculture, Water and Sanitation. Brian is also the founder of UjuziKilimo, an agricultural technology company bringing precision farming technology to smallholding farms to produce more, in order to decrease hunger and food insecurity which has challenged over 1 billion people globally.
3) Good Health and Well Being: Olivier Noel
Olivier is a Haitian One Young World Ambassador from the United States, who is passionate about the issues in healthcare disparity, genetic research, and precision medicine. He founded a genetics startup company called DNAsimple, which connects researchers to patients or study participants, to ultimately obtain their DNA or specimens for research studies while compensating these participants. Through this company, it is Olivier’s goal to increase the pace of genetic research as well as the diversity of the pool of research participants so that cures can be found for diseases based on ones’ specific DNA variants or markers.
4) Education: Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown is the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education. Previously, Brown has also served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007. He is a strong advocate for global action to ensure education for all and works closely with crucial partners to help build support for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of achieving quality, relevant, and comprehensive education for every child globally.
5) Gender Equality: Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen is a One Young World Ambassador from the United States. She is the founder and CEO of Rise, a non-governmental civil rights organization promoting gender equality for all. In 2016, Rise spearheaded the passage of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights through the U.S. Congress, becoming the 21st bill in modern U.S. history to pass unanimously through Congress. In addition, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2018.
6) Clean Water and Sanitation: Daroath Phav
Phav is a social entrepreneur, and current Executive Director of WaterSHED, an organization that uses a systems-approach to build the rural market for water, sanitation, and hygiene products, which operates across Southeast Asia. In addition, Phav has played a crucial role in implementing WaterSHED’s hands off approach to sanitation, that has expanded across eight provinces in Cambodia, a country that has battled with sanitation issues for decades.
7) Renewable Energy: Akon
Akon is a former American rapper, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Beginning in 2014, Akon founded the Akon Lighting Africa project with Samba Bathily and Thione Niang, a program with the aims of providing electricity by solar energy throughout Africa. Besides for providing solar lighting and other products to communities, Akon has also begun training workers in solar technology schools to further his campaign.
8) Good Jobs and Economic Growth: Rosario Dawson & Abrima Erwiah
Rosario Dawson is a Hollywood actress, social entrepreneur, as well as a woman’s rights and environmental activist from the United States. Partnered with Abrima Erwiah, a social entrepreneur with 16 years of experience in the fashion and luxury industry, they founded the Studio One Eighty Nine social enterprise. The organization which is based in Ghana and the United States, supports artisan produced African products and clothing. Furthermore, the social enterprise supports job creation and skills training in artisanal communities that specialize in traditional African craft techniques, such as hand batik and kente weaving.
9) Innovation and infrastructure: Biz Stone
Biz Stone is an American entrepreneur who is best known for co-founding the social media platform Twitter. He has been honoured with the International Center for Journalists Innovation Award, Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc. Magazine, and was also named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Stone is also a strong advocator for social media, as he believes that it provides people with the courage to speak up through and advocate their freedom of speech.
10) Reduced Inequalities: Sinead Burke
Burke is a teacher, writer, fashion-admirer, as well as an advocate for disability and design. She has co-founded the Inclusive Fashion and Design Collective (IFDC) with US disability advocate Liz Jackson, in order to challenge designers who traditionally haven’t thought diversely with regards individuals with disabilities. Through their work, they have advocated for discovering beautiful solutions to these inequality challenges, and to make design more inclusive.
11) Sustainable Cities: Naisula Lesuuda
Lesuuda is a Kenyan politician and woman’s rights activist. She became the founding member of the Laikipia Peace Caravan, and through her work with the organization, become the youngest Kenyan woman to win the presidential Order of the Grand Warrior. In addition, Lesuuda has founded the Naisula Lesuuda Peace Foundation which advocates for the education of girls and for the eradication of female genital mutilation and child marriage.
12) Responsible consumption and production: Paul Polman
Polman is a Dutch businessman, and CEO of Unilever. Through Polman’s leadership at Unilever, the organization has set a target to decouple its growth from its overall environmental footprint and improve its social impact through the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. Polman says that in a world limited in resources, running a sustainable business is essential to its long-term growth, risks, and costs.
13) Climate Action: Christiana Figueres
Figueres is an internationally recognized Costa Rican leader on global climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010-2016. Assuming responsibility for the international climate change negotiations after the failed Copenhagen conference of 2009, she was determined to lead the process to a universally agreed regulatory framework. Building toward that goal, she directed the successful Conferences of the Parties in Cancun 2010, Durban 2011, Doha 2012, Warsaw 2013, and Lima 2014, and culminated her efforts in the historical Paris Agreement of 2015.
14) Life below water: Jacqueline Fernandez
Jacqueline Fernandez is a Sri Lankan actress, former model, and was crowned Miss Universe Sri Lanka in 2006. She is an active humanitarian advocate and was awarded the Humanitarian of the Year Award at the 2017 Asian Voice Charity Awards for her work with Habitat for Humanity.
15) Life on Land: Neyder Culchac
Culchac is a young Colombian farmer, who has advocated for the transformation of farms once utilized in the production of illicit crops, to farms that can produce safe, alternative licit crops. Through his advocacy, Culchac strives to eradicate the violence has emerged through the production of illicit crops such as coca.
16) Peace, justice & strong institutions: Theodor Meron
President Meron has been a Judge and the President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Mechanism) since the Mechanism’s establishment in 2012. He was also a Judge on the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) since his election to the ICTY in March 2001, and until the closure of those Tribunals. In addition, Meron has been the recipient of numerous awards, such as the Hudson Medal (ASIL and the Haskins Prize (ACLS) as well as Officer of the French Legion of Honour.
17) Partnerships for the Goals: Jayathma Wickramanayake
Wickramanayake was appointed as the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth in 2017. In this role, she works to expand the UN’s youth engagement and advocacy efforts across all four pillars of work (sustainable development, human rights, peace and security, and humanitarian action) and also serves as a representative and advisor to the Secretary-General. Wickramanayake has also worked extensively on youth development and participation, and has played a key role in transforming the youth development sector in her home country of Sri Lanka. Previously, she has also advocated for global youth development on an international level, including being the first ever Sri Lankan Youth Delegate to the United Nations.
Link to original release can be found HERE
