To provide female seaweed farmers with a reliable marketplace for their produce, Nancy founded Healthy Seaweed Co. The company buys and processes seaweed. It also offers women in the seaweed industry training on farming best practices, technical support and financial literacy.

At the Summit in Belfast, Nancy attracted investors that helped her grow her business internationally and gain recognition as a global advocate for seaweed. After the Summit, she maintained her relationship with her partner dsm-firmenich. The organisation’s SVP of Talent and Culture later joined her in Tanzania to certify divers, enabling ocean access and creating more opportunities in the blue economy sector for 26 young people in the country. 

The company currently partners with 130 women. It offers 13 seaweed-based products, with stockists in South Africa and Ghana, and ships internationally. Over the past year, it has processed 80 tonnes of seaweed, an estimated 9.88 acres of seaweed cultivation, and built a customer base of 5,000 returning buyers.

Healthy Seaweed Co. benefits consumers as well as producers. Consuming seaweed contributes to a balanced diet and boosts immunity.1 Nancy’s awareness campaigns have educated people on how seaweed can reduce non-communicable diseases by promoting balanced nutrition, reaching over 500,000 people.

Alejandro served as the Executive Director of El Derecho a No Obedecer, a social advocacy platform empowering young people, until mid-2022 when he transitioned to a position on the board.

El Derecho a No Obedecer has developed a number of social campaigns, including on the plight of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia, and raising awareness of air quality issues while empowering young people in Latin America to advocate for cleaner, healthier air. 

AstraZeneca’s support via the Young Health Programme allowed Alejandro and his colleague, Fernanda Bedoya Horta, to improve and expand their work on the intersection of air quality and health in three Colombian cities by co-financing their grassroots team. This team has been instrumental in facilitating connections between communities in vulnerable areas with healthcare professionals and public health centres. AstraZeneca’s support also helped the team bring the Nuevos Aires School to new parts of Colombia, with increased engagement amongst students living in cities where poor air quality is a growing concern. The Nuevos Aires School programme successfully strengthened the capacity of these young students to conceptualise the challenges of and solutions to poor air quality, and advocate for improvement in their localities. Finally, AstraZeneca’s support has been instrumental in preparing the next generation of air quality activists in Colombia.

El Derecho a No Obedecer’s air quality activism and outreach successfully strengthened the capacities of 291 young leaders from public schools and universities in Bogotá, Cúcata, Cali, and Medellin. The project developed and organised a gamified approach to facilitate student learning on air quality, climate justice, the health effects of pollution, and the sources and types of pollutants. The final workshop included instruction on air quality measurement sensors, with a low-cost sensor installed in each school. As a result of this intervention, the students are able to design new advocacy processes to change health policies and priorities in their schools and communities. 

Finally, El Derecho a No Obedecer organised a virtual webinar to create a national network of young leaders from public schools and healthcare professionals to advocate for clean air. The webinar included a lecture by a medical expert on public health and air quality, after which representatives from each school shared their experiences and learnings from the project. A total of 101 healthcare professionals participated in the project’s activities.

Enkhuun founded Breathe Mongolia - Clean Air Coalition in 2019 as a nonprofit organisation working to end Mongolia’s air pollution crisis through grassroots outreach and policy advocacy. 

Enkhuun won the Lead2030 challenge sponsored by AstraZeneca in 2022, and used the grant funding to expand her team and capacity to act on the ground in Mongolia. At this time, Breathe Mongolia worked with 28 families to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, monitor air quality in their homes, and supported 67 children with neurodevelopmental assessments. Its workshops have impacted over 500 young people.

Since 2022, Breathe Mongolia has been an annual recipient of an AstraZeneca grant. Its most recent programme, in 2024, has focussed on preventing carbon monoxide poisoning by giving vulnerable people resources and toolkits on how to minimise the risk of being poisoned, reaching over a thousand households. Breathe Mongolia also established a capacity building programme on environmental journalism for 21 journalists across Mongolia, while its Earth School has trained 580 students through four months of environmental knowledge and climate action. 

Additionally, the organisation ran smaller, intensive capacity-building programmes for high schools, with eight fellows trained on climate and clean air, while the Clean Air Social Entrepreneurs programme focuses on creating social change and career pathways with 20 students. Breathe Mongolia has also scaled its advocacy campaigns significantly. It works with Air Quality AI by providing data and running simulations, while also working with Mongolian government ministries to understand their action plans and ensure alignment between these action plans and the clean air targets the government has set for itself. 

Breathe Mongolia has also worked with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute to translate their interactive platform and hone it for a Mongolian context, while simultaneously building collaborations with other civil society actors in the country. AstraZeneca’s support has supported Breathe Mongolia by strengthening its team capacity to act for better health outcomes for Mongolians.

Fabián co-founded PuntajeNacional in 2009, a pioneering EdTech platform created to democratise access to higher education across Latin America. The platform offers free, high-quality educational resources, aiming to eliminate the systemic barriers that marginalised students face when applying to university.

While completing his Master's in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sussex, Fabián attended the Summit in Bangkok. This experience reaffirmed his commitment to social equity and expanded it beyond education to employment. After the Summit, Fabián realised that without equal access to job opportunities, the cycle of inequality would continue. This insight led him to co-found Genomawork in 2018.

Genomawork is an AI-powered recruitment platform built to level the playing field in the labour market. Using gamified assessments that measure cognitive, emotional, and personality traits, Genomawork helps companies identify talent based on potential, not privilege. Its methodology reduces biases linked to factors like last names, socioeconomic background, or where someone studied.

To date, PuntajeNacional has reached over four million students, with one million Chilean users actively preparing for university through the platform. Website content has been viewed over 100 million times, and it partners with 600+ schools to ensure access remains free for students. Genomawork has supported more than two million job applicants with personalised feedback and partners with over 200 companies across 15 countries in Latin America. Through both initiatives, he remains committed to building a fairer, more inclusive future for young people across the region.

To address menstrual taboos, provide mental health education, and distribute period products in India, Swara founded the Period Society in 2019.

Foremost, the organisation trains individuals to become menstrual health educators in their local communities. Its second project focuses on distributing period products adapted to the local environment. Depending on water availability, communities receive either disposable or reusable products. The reusable pads are sewn locally so that communities can achieve menstrual product self-sufficiency.

Swara attended the Summit in Manchester, where she made valuable connections that later led to project funding, including support from Starbucks UK's Women's Impact Network. She was inspired by how others, including the First Lady of Guyana, are addressing similar menstrual hygiene challenges in their own cultures and contexts.

To date, the Period Society has distributed over 1.1 million menstrual hygiene kits and educated 60,000 people through menstrual hygiene sessions. Looking ahead, the organisation plans to launch programmes on sexual and reproductive health, including a pilot campaign to raise awareness about the HPV vaccine. The project also hopes to expand into all eight states in northeastern India.

Bupe founded Genius Education Zambia to promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and 21st-century skills.The youth-led organisation provides young people in Zambia with an EdTech platform hosting educational videos that encourage user interaction. It also hosts TEM Awards, writing contests, science fairs, innovation hubs, e-learning, academic mentorship programs, leadership development, STEM camps, and Robotics and Artificial Intelligence clubs.

Bupe attended the 2022 One Young World Summit in Manchester, where she connected with her mentor, former UN Under-Secretary-General Michael Møller. She credits his guidance with helping her reach key milestones in the years since, including being named to Zambia’s 30 Under 30 List and becoming a Science Diplomat at the Geneva Science Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA).

Over 100,000 young Zambians have taken part in Genius Education Zambia’s programmes since it started. Genius Education Zambia worked with Zambia’s National Science Center to help bring science and technology into schools. Their curriculum won the prestigious QS Reimagine Education Award and has been strengthened through partnerships with organisations such as the U.S. Government, the World Bank, and SAP.
 

Ruth works with the Slum and Rural Health Initiative, a non-governmental organisation in Nigeria providing vulnerable people and communities with vital health information.

The organisation’s work is preventative, giving people the tools and knowledge they need to make informed decisions about their health outcomes. It has a specific focus on non-communicable diseases, which accounted for almost 30% of all deaths in Nigeria in 2023.

Ruth and her team recognise that non-communicable diseases are usually the result of modifiable behaviours that are often initiated in adolescence. As a result, the organisation decided to target young people in secondary schools across five regions of Nigeria. The Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign first trained local undergraduate students on what non-communicable diseases are, their risk factors, how risks can be mitigated, and other essential information that can impact community health outcomes. These undergraduates were then tasked with going to secondary schools and introducing a curriculum on non-communicable diseases to the students there.

The Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign was funded by an AstraZeneca grant. As part of her AstraZeneca Young Health Programme Fellowship, Ruth attended the Summit in Belfast, where she built connections with other young leaders in health. She also learned significant lessons on community engagement which she has been able to successfully implement into her own work. Ruth subsequently put more emphasis on documenting her work as a result of her time at the Summit, while taking full advantage of AstraZeneca’s capacity building sessions and mini-MBA programme.

The Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign trained a total of 172 undergraduate students in non-communicable diseases, of which 120 went on to support the secondary school outreach programme. In total, 10,273 secondary school students were reached across five states of Nigeria. Some of these volunteers have gone on to train their peers beyond the scope of the Adopt a School Non-Communicable Disease Campaign, while secondary school students who have been reached also passed information to their parents.
 

Atuhurra founded the Gejja Women Foundation, which supports women by offering education, regenerative agriculture training, business development guidance, and menstrual hygiene workshops to help them build sustainable livelihoods. 
The foundation economically empowers rural women aged 5 to 75 from marginalised backgrounds, including refugees, widows, and orphans. In addition to programming, it operates two production spaces for reusable menstrual hygiene products.

Atuhurra spoke as a Delegate Speaker at the hybrid Summit hosted in 2021 in Munich. Aligned with One Young World's mission of empowering young leaders to create a more just, sustainable, and inclusive world, she and her co-directors “combine [their] stories and past experiences and realise that all have the same passion.”

By 2024, the Gejja Women Foundation provided six girls and 12 adult learners with resources to finish school, 300 farmers with seed loans, 2,000 women with business start-up support, and 60,000 people with menstrual hygiene products or reusable sanitary kits. In total, menstrual hygiene products have been provided to 200,000 people. 

Martha Lidia served as Co-Executive Director of the MAIA Impact School, an organisation providing comprehensive, rounded education to Indigenous girls.

Led by Indigenous women, the school has made significant gains in facilitating access to educational opportunities for vulnerable, underprivileged Indigenous communities in Guatemala. Through support from AstraZeneca’s Young Health Programme, MAIA has integrated mental health and wellbeing education into its curriculum and activities, supporting its students beyond the narrower limits of traditional academic success.

MAIA has established a clinic at its school, with a nurse actively providing healthcare assistance during school hours. The school also has a team of social workers who act as mentors for individuals, groups, and families within the MAIA ecosystem. These social workers speak about mental health, and actively include family members to help break down mental health taboos in Indigenous communities in Guatemala. This community connection allows MAIA to build trusting and empathetic relationships, while its emphasis on socio-emotional learning teaches students to express themselves in a healthy manner conducive to long-term wellbeing.

Martha Lidia attended the One Young World Summits in Belfast, 2023, and Montréal/Tiohtià:ke, 2024. She found the latter Summit to be particularly successful in its intentionality towards building bridges with Indigenous communities, engaging Indigenous young leaders and ensuring Indigenous representation. Martha Lidia has made important connections through her One Young World journey, and sits on the organisation’s Indigenous Council. Martha Lidia has also been particularly impressed with AstraZeneca’s commitment to building a supportive ecosystem for Indigenous young leaders. She has continued fostering relationships with her peers in the Young Health Programme Fellowship, engaging in informal knowledge sharing activities and working towards authentic collaboration with other participants.

MAIA’s incorporation of health knowledge, wellbeing, and socio-emotional learning has impacted hundreds of students across multiple years. With AstraZeneca’s support, the organisation has reached thousands of family members in Indigenous communities in Guatemala, facilitating systemic behavioural change towards mental health and socio-emotional learning. The students and families MAIA works with have increased confidence, resources, and agency to act for their own wellbeing.

Katerina is the founder of Loono, a non-profit organisation focused primarily on raising awareness, improving health literacy, and promoting preventative care through its core value of health equity.

The organisation’s activities target and reach the general public, medical students, and legislators through advocacy campaigns. Loono also has a mobile app Loono, through which people can access valuable health information and receive reminders to attend vital preventive check-ups and a vaccination calendar. Loono contributes to national preventive health guidelines, collaborating with Czech medical societies and the country’s Ministry of Health while also providing educational materials to hospitals and doctors’ offices.

With support from AstraZeneca via the Young Health Programme, Loono has developed a new Healthy Living Tips feature in its app, focussing specifically on improving sleep quality. AstraZeneca’s grant support has also facilitated new business development opportunities and strategic partnerships for Loono, helping the organisation gain a better understanding of pharmaceutical industry planning, data management, and the patient journey. The Loono team also created a microsite for corporate partners, showcasing collaboration opportunities to enable further cooperation. The organisation significantly expanded its educational content to tackle non-communicable diseases and developed interactive material for students to introduce healthier habits from a young age. Loono successfully accomplished this in collaboration with its partner organisations.

Through the One Young World Summit, Katerina was able to connect with a Czech representative of ČEZ Group, and Loono has subsequently collaborated with them to offer educational information on health and prevention within the company. Katerina also found the mentoring she received from AstraZeneca to be particularly beneficial, as well as AstraZeneca’s feedback on Loono’s workshops and help in connecting Loono with public sector stakeholders.

Since winning AstraZeneca’s Lead2030 Challenge in 2023, Loono under Katerina’s leadership has recorded an additional 31,000 users of its app. Of these, 19,371 users have reported completing preventive check-ups, while 14,541 users have performed self-examinations based on guidance available through the app. The organisation has also contributed directly to the early detection of 24 cancer cases. Loono created a dedicated event for HR and CSR professionals, strengthening its outreach and securing 19 new partnerships.
 

U-recycle Initiative Africa combats plastic pollution and promotes environmental sustainability through capacity building.

Founded in 2018 by One Young World Ambassador Oluwaseyi Jesuton, U-recycle Initiative Africa educates and equips young people with skills to tackle plastic pollution and climate change through outreach programmes, professional fellowships, bootcamps, and school campaigns.

Oluwaseyi attended the Summit in Belfast. As a reserve Delegate Speaker, Oluwaseyi wrote and delivered a speech that was recorded and uploaded onto the One Young World YouTube channel. This amplified her work and profile.

Since 2018, U-recycle Initiative Africa has implemented over 75 projects in 11 African countries and provided 10,000 youth with the knowledge and tools to tackle environmental issues in their schools and communities.

Flagship programmes include The African-Youth-for-Environment Fellowship (AY4E), involving 5,000 young people, and the PlasticWize Fellowship. The latter gave 30 female university students the resources needed to implement innovative solutions to reduce single-use plastics on campuses. One innovation is the ‘talking’ bin with a mouth that eats waste, comical eyes and speech bubbles to encourage recycling habits and awareness of plastic pollution. 25 talking bins are now found across four universities in Nigeria with 244,598 plastic bottles collected at one university in just 10 weeks. Other strategies to foster behavioural change include the PlasticWize 21-day Challenge, an online gamified platform to train young people in environmental issues.

U-recycle Initiative Africa combines technology with research. One project analysed water, soil, sediment, and fish in an Indigenous coastal community to demonstrate the damage and health risks associated with plastic pollution. Findings informed policy recommendations and demonstrated how community-rooted science can influence climate justice and reduce plastic use nationally.

rePurpose Global is a platform that encourages brands, consumers, innovators, and policymakers to reduce their plastic footprints through circular economy solutions.

The organisation acts as a bridge between companies and waste management organisations on the ground, implementing a solution that reduces plastic waste generation in the long term. In addition, rePurpose provides partnering waste management organisations with technological support, funding, and knowledge to help them scale their operations. Waste workers in low-income and middle-income countries are largely part of the informal economy, working for reduced pay, without benefits, and often in substandard conditions.1 Svanika is transforming the lives of waste workers by improving their working conditions, ensuring fair pay, providing health insurance, and improving their financial security by facilitating access to pension funds and bank accounts.

In 2021, Svanika attended the Summit in Munich as a Lead 2030 winner with Credit Suisse. The mentorship that Svanika received helped her understand large scale companies and the role that rePurpose can play in bringing social impact to the private sector. The recognition that rePurpose received from One Young World and Credit Suisse helped them build visibility and gain bargaining power while negotiating with large companies.

rePurpose Global has recovered 38,500 tonnes of nature-bound plastic and mitigated over 111,800 tonnes of carbon, protecting critical ocean ecosystems. The organisation has also built over 100 classrooms and 15 houses for low-income groups, using plastic upcycled into bricks and wood. Through rePurpose, Svanika has provided 2,500 waste workers with formal employment benefits, health and safety measures, and improved working conditions. The organisation has also provided 2.5 million people with waste management services. The next step for Svanika is to build a new software product that will help companies design environmentally sustainable packaging in compliance with regulations.
 

Ahmed Ramy founded Nrecycli, a start-up that encourages recycling by rewarding people who recycle at designated collection places with points through an app.

These points can then be used to purchase rewards in a virtual marketplace, such as printing credits or gift cards. When signing up for the app, users also receive training in what is and is not recyclable.

One of Ahmed Ramy’s favourite parts of being in the One Young World community is the community offerings, such as the Community Platform. While attending the Summit virtually, he found that the digital offerings helped him build meaningful connections with both in-person and online Ambassadors, connections which he maintains to this day.

Nrecycli has 100,000 app users, who have collectively recycled 180,000 tonnes of plastic. This amounts to 522,000 tCO2 mitigated. The enterprise has also created 150 collection points where people can deposit waste. Looking ahead, the project is excited to continue expanding into the private sector and now offers a recycling service for companies that want to begin implementing in-office recycling.
 

Michael founded Raising Star Africa in 2020 to educate young people with disabilities in Nigeria. He renovates and installs specialist equipment in schools to make them accessible, trains teachers in disability inclusion, and runs skills empowerment programmes to enable young people with disabilities to develop confidence.
  
Michael was a Delegate Speaker at the Summit in Belfast. This gave him the opportunity to advocate for people with disabilities globally and collaborate with other young leaders. 

So far, Raising Star Africa has renovated and equipped five schools making them inclusive and accessible. This has resulted in 2,500 disabled children and young people receiving four years of education. Another programme delivers vocational training once a week to 250 young people with disabilities. Training includes cooking, graphic design, tailoring, digital literacy, coding, repurposing recycled goods, shoe and furniture making. Life skills training once a month for a further 3,800 disabled young people includes understanding identity, personal and menstrual hygiene, the law, and basic human rights. Volunteers also take students and young people with disabilities to shopping malls and museums to broaden their social skills and outlook.  

Michael also hosts public advocacy events. This Ability and Sport Fest are one-day annual festivals that have showcased the talent, potential, and sporting prowess of 2,500 young people with disabilities. They also serve to reduce societal stigma related to disability. At these events, policymakers and local community leaders are invited to gain a deeper understanding of disability needs and how policies can be more inclusive.

Next year Michael is collaborating with a One Young World Ambassador from Germany. They will provide laptops to deliver more digital skills training and web-based learning opportunities for children with disabilities.

Juliet is the founder of Kimuli Collections, a sustainable fashion brand that collects plastic waste and transforms it into wearable garments. Through the brand, she has collected over 50 tonnes of plastic waste, upcycling 80% of it to create more than 2,000 garments and accessories.

Through the One Young World Action Accelerator programme, Juliet came up with the idea to manufacture conference products such as lanyards and bags. Kimuli Collections is also launching a new initiative to purchase banana fibers from farmers to produce single-use pads and manufacture reusable fabric pads.

Juliet has provided vocational training and employment to youth and people with disabilities, training over 120 youth and 198 people with disabilities who collect, sort, or sew waste to make garments. Of these, 15 vocational training participants have been chosen as full time tailors, with part time tailors, waste collectors, and waste sorters contributing a cumulative 263,900 hours of employment. In turn, this allows them to access stable incomes. The project has also provided recycling education to 5,000 children in school.

Juliet has provided over 120 youth and 98 people with disabilities with vocational training. Of these, Kimuli Collections has employed 55 people, 15 of whom are vocational training participants who have been chosen as full-time tailors. The others are employed as part-time tailors, waste collectors, and waste sorters, contributing a cumulative 263,900 hours of employment. In turn, this allows them to access stable incomes. Additionally, this project has also provided recycling education to 5,000 children in school.