Sayeed Muhammad: Her #FreePeriods campaign that brought her granddad and 2,000 other protestors on Downing Street in the UK in December 2017 to demand free sanitary products for poor girls in school won 18-year-old Amika George one of the three Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards, popularly known as the Oscars for social progress.
The other awards at the ceremony in New York on Tuesday night went to Nadia Murad, 24, a Yazidi survivor of Islamic State (IS) genocide in Iraq, and Dysmus Kisilu, 28, whose renewable energy solutions increased yields of small farmers in Kenya by 150%, reports Hindustan Times.
Goalkeepers was started by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017 to propel global action and track progress on the United Nation’s Sustainable Developmental Goals. French president Emmanuel Macron, women and children’s rights activist Graça Machel, writer-activist Richard Curtis, musician King Kaka, and actor Stephen Fry were among the speakers this year.
George won the Campaign Award for a youth-led campaign that led to the UK government granting 1.5 million pounds to end ‘period poverty’ that prevented many girls from low-income families from attending school. Indian-origin George has lived all her life in the UK, where her grandparents moved from Kerala.